Migrating to Bootstrap 5

[fsbraun]

Migration to new bootstrap versions has been a bit of a pain from djangocms-bootstrap3 to djangocms-bootstrap4. Now bootstrap5 has been out a while.

To quickly offer bootstrap 5 features to Django-CMS and to mitigate future migrations I am proposing a different approach for the future which I have drafted in djangocms-frontend :

• Separation of plugins from css framework, i.e., no need to rebuild you site's plugin tree if css framework is changed in the future, e.g., from Bootstrap 5 to a future version.
• New link plugin allowing to link to internal pages provided by other applications, such as djangocms-blog.
• Nice and well-arranged admin frontend of djangocms-bootstrap4
• Management command to migrate from djangocms-bootstrap4. This command automatically migrates all djangocms-bootstrap4 plugins to djangocms-frontend.
• Extensible within the app and with separate app (e.g., a theme app)
• Adaptation of templates to reflect breaking changes in bootstrap 5 vs. bootstrap 4.
• Added missing Accordion plugin and simple forms plugin w/ Bootstrap-styled forms on your cms page.

Technically, this means replacing the models of djangocms-bootstrap4 with s single djangocms_frontend model. The configuration of each plugin element is stored in a JSON field. Thus existing plugins can be extended w/o the need of database migrations, e.g., adding an option to have a container covered by a background image.

For future new versions of bootstrap (or, if the need is there, another css framework) only the templates and render mixins would have to be adjusted. No need to rebuild the plugin tree. This way content editors will not have to worry about the css framework versions.

There is work to be done. Tests run coverage, e.g., needs to be improved. Also, configuration options still need to be somewhat refactored. Documentation is incomplete. Nevertheless, I would love to hear your opinion and feedback on how helpful this might be. Also, if anyone would love to participate in driving this forward, I'd really appreciate it!

Thanks very much!

[fsbraun]

Djangocms-frontend is now available as a package in pypi: Just hit pip install djangocms-frontend to check it out!