Good question. Yes Blocs 3 will open Blocs 2 projects.
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After doing a bit of reading, which I know is dangerous, I’m thinking partly about the moves to Sass and flexbox, 5 grid tiers or the application of different classes for responsive images and navber alignment etc. If I open a current project will it look and function much the same in Blocs 3 before making any radical changes?
Im hoping Blocs 3 will carry out a migration on projects to bump them up to Bootstrap 4, so all that will be automated and taken care of for you.
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That’s mainly what I wanted to know and presumably this is something that will be thoroughly tested during beta testing of Blocs 3. I’m hoping various users can be involved in that process to provide you with as much useful feedback as possible.
I hope, I’m one of them.
I am hoping it will be like that. Of course, I would do my best to help with testing as well!
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I think if blocsapp was my project, I wouldn’t attempt to migrate projects from Bootrap 3 to Bootstrap 4. I’d just freeze Blocsapp 2.x with Bootstrap3.
For Blocsapp 3 I’d only worry about Bootstrap 4.
Why?
People can still use blocsapp 2.x on existing projects.
The translation from Bootstrap 3 to Bootstrap4 is likely to be harder than you imagine and you stand a high chance of a lot of hassle from users when the translation screws up. You’ll then be trying to debug blocsapp3 with Bootstrap 4 and wondering if the translation is the problem or whether it’s just a blocsapp 3 problem with boostrap4.
If you don’t do the translation from bootstrap3 to bootstrap 4 you keep the blocsapp3 codebase focussed and not full of a ton of dodgy legacy upgrade code.
So my advice as a user and as a developer is not to try and transition existing blocsapp projects to bootstrap4.
Just my opinion. If you had a team of ten people my advice might be different.
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As a seasoned web and mobile developer, and as a user of blocs too, I concur. I think you’re asking for a bunch of trouble creating a migration path. Allow Blocs 2 and Blocs 3 to run side by side, that way existing Blocs 2 projects can still be maintained. The conversion to flexbox alone gives me shivers, let alone all of the other changes made to almost every component in BS4.
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We will see, it’s likely that it’ll be beta tested but if it’s not successful and far too complex to pull off, it may be pulled.
However from my reading on Bootstrap 4 regarding the actual markup, a bunch of class names changed and a few components such as panels have different markup and names. Updating the the code shouldn’t be too taxing, but we shall see.
Ideally I’d like to migrate, but of course anything is possible and I can’t confirm anything 100% yet.
If I think back to various apps I’ve used with proprietary file formats there is usually a migration path, but it’s a one way deal and you cannot go backwards after saving the project.
On small projects that are already complete I’d have no problems maintaining them in Blocs 2. It’s just tricky starting on something bigger at this point, knowing that there are still questions over how the switch will go to Bootstrap 4. Obviously if it turns out they can migrate seamlessly that would be fantastic.
Obviously at this stage I cant confirm anything other than I have the intention to offer the migration feature, however it may take a while to get right and I wouldn’t let that hold up the launch. So if its not ready it may come at a later date once the initial launch dust settles.
I’d say that once the beta is out there, it’ll be used for live projects ( no matter how dire the warnings are ) and someone will take an old project and run with it as a blocsapp 3 conversion if that feature exists, so it may not be so popular at that stage to change course (ie drop the conversion route) mid beta test.
There’s also the question of custom brics and HTML brics adding functionality to blocsapp 2.x and bootstrap3, whether they may be broken by a conversion to blocsapp 3.x and bootstrap4.
Having a bigger project using blocsapp 2.x that can’t be migrated, shouldn’t be a big issue. I expect blocsapp 2.x will function for some time to come. Change is always with us.
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The Blocs migration will change the code Blocs generates, custom class, Brics and HTML widgets wouldn’t be touched. That would all be noted during the migration process.
It’s possible that people have widgets that expect and use bootstrap 3, so it’s not a given that customisations will always work after conversion.
Assuming you are talking about code from external sources I think users would have to accept that is not part of Blocs, so they may need to update their code if they wish to use these widgets with Blocs 3.
Indeed, but not everyone reads the small print!
Time will tell.
Indeed, its really not that monumental of a change regarding those things.
You can find various online convertors:
Even things such as this:
Seems like there is various resistance by users regarding the thought of having such migration however.
I am sure it will all play out accordingly, keep up the good work.
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Dito from here.
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I can’t say that I’m an advanced web developer but as being in the IT industry for over 30 years now and as a technology consultant with an decent understanding of transitions like that, what you say makes much sense to me. The key point you mentioned is the TEAM. If there were another 10 people, then why not trying? But there is a risk of loosing stability and spending all your time fixing instead of further pushing the product to new heights.
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