Semantic UI in Volto..is Semantic UI really the future?

The latest 2.4.0 release of Semantic UI is more than 12 months old.
Rumors and some research claim that the Semantic UI development is dead (in favor for Element UI)? What's the situation with Semantic UI in Volto now and for the future?


Related:

Imho, at some point we will need to discuss a possible switch to Fomantic-UI or something similar. It's not really a priority right now since the core of semantic is stable and still works perfectly for us (like Bootstrap 3 does for Barceloneta). In addition to that, I don't expect many possible security flaws with styles.

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Here is some background: Semantic UI was and is the only CSS framework that provides all the features we need for Volto. The React part of Semantic UI is very well maintained and active. This is the library that is important to us.

Semantic UI (the CSS library) is stable and provides all we need. There is an actively maintained community fork of Semantic UI we can switch to, if neccessary. This would be our first option. See our discussion on gh for more details:

Though, I do not see any good reason right now to do so. Plone 5 runs on Bootstrap 3. Was that ever an issue for anybody? I don't think so. CSS frameworks are just a bunch of CSS files with no security issues and usually not much to do. Our main issue with Plone 5 was/is patternslib and our outdated JS stack but not the CSS lib.

We actively monitored and evaluated CSS frameworks over > 3 years now. Very promising options just vanished (Material Light which was maintained by Google) others were hard to impossible to theme (Material Design), most options just implemented the css part an nothing else (materialize.css, etc, which means we have to implement our own patternslib again or come up with our own theming mechanism).

If you compare Semantic UI React:

and Element React:

you will see that Semantic UI React is far more mature, stable and better maintained than Element UI React. Semantic UI React is used by 60k projects, Element UI React by 1k projects.

You are free to choose whatever framework and CSS lib you like, on top of Plone REST API. Though, as Volto team we have to make decisions that allow us to provide the stability and reliability that Plone users, projects, and clients require.

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First, not everyone has the in-depth background and knowledge about of all underlaying frameworks. The outside view is that your are using React as an actively maintained component and on the other hand it looks from outside that Semantic-UI is dead. I was not aware of the community fork of Semantic UI. It's all about marketing. When it comes to the Volto integration into Plone 6 then all components should be based on supported and maintained components and it should be clearly documented...that's all about I am asking.

You asked a very valid question and I never intended to sound harsh or unfriendly. Though, I replied to the same kind of question to you and others on gh and/or Twitter already. :slight_smile:

Maybe a FAQ section on the Volto README would make sense to avoid this situation to happen in the future.

We had to make lots of decisions in the process of developing Volto and choosing a CSS framework was actually a lot harder for us than choosing a JS framework.

Peace :slight_smile:

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Just a follow-up that @sneridagh just told me about. Thanks to @pnicolli, we moved theme.js to a separate file to make it easier for people to use a different CSS framework with Volto:

So you can give Element UI on Volto a shot if you want...

See Volto for public frontend only for updates on this followup from @tisto.