Are there any plans to update less.php?

Developing with Concrete
1

I only got into Concrete CMS development during the 8.x → 9.x transition but quickly found the built-in LESS integration handy and reliable. It’s just that the included less.php version (1.8.x) is pretty ancient and I find myself using a lot of ~"" wrapping, duplicating vars in LESS and native CSS and generally not being able to use nice new CSS features because the compiler isn’t aware of them.

Is it that LESS is now deprecated and we shouldn’t be expecting updates to less.php or are there plans to get it up to speed at some point?

2

@wtflm in v9, LESS is technically supported, but it’s mostly for backward compatibility. SASS is the way forward, especially since it’s what Bootstrap and hence Bedrock supports. Here’s the v9 documentation for SASS: https://documentation.concretecms.org/9-x/developers/working-themes/sass-overrides

3

I bumped into this paper (in Polish) a few days ago. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354980318_Comparison_of_the_compilation_speed_of_the_SCSS_and_LESS_preprocessors

For live server compilation of larger amounts of code, it shows how SASS performance escalates compared to LESS.

Its not a strictly like-for-like comparison because Ruby was used for SCSS and Javascript for LESS. Its the shape of the lines on the chart that are relevant, not the absolute values. For those wanting just a quick summary:

image

I can’t read Polish, so had to rely on automated translation from

4

Thanks for the replies, although a little disappointing. Improved performance is nice of course, but I feel for some projects the SASS way adds undesirable development overhead especially when Bootstrap/Bedrock add little value over native CSS layout tools.

5

For reference, here’s the original discussion and the actual implementation.

There was also some previous discussion about making preprocessors swappable here.

I wasn’t involved in any of that, but from my quick perusal, it seems that the community was (is) open to discussions and changes, so if there’s something that was missed or some new information that moves the needle back towards a need to support newer versions of LESS, please create an issue either on GitHub (ideal) or here.