How is everybody doing with Bedrock?

Developing with Concrete
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Hello everybody

I’m trying to analyse the popularity and use of the Bedrock workflow by browsing our forum about this topic.

Why? Three years ago I posted this:
Version 9: What would be the easiest way to build a theme using Bedrock/Bootstrap5? and the thread is still active, the latest entry this September. It is even at the top with a record of 91 replies and almost top with over 5600 views. Many users, major developers and core members have replied with their contributions to this thread.

Now, today, looking at available Bedrock themes: Until September this year we had afik 3 or 4 themes using Bedrock/BS5 and no free theme except the built-in Atomik. Late October 2024 another handful of paid themes using Bedrock/BS5 themes were added, and finally one installable, free theme «basic_bedrock_theme", developed three years ago by @afixia was added to the marketplace.

Converting old BS3 themes to CMS v9 and making them work under PHP 8 has caused a lot of work and pain. I see in many posts, that a lot of users get by, converting their old BS3 themes using LESS. Most themes in the new Marketplace are converted BS3 not SASS/Bedrock.

Cloning Atomik or building your own theme is rather difficult for normal users. I’m sure experienced developers are using Bedrock in their themes but not the code-unexperienced. I admit, we struggled with Bedrock. We started a few times and gave up. So did most of our students.

When our students (architects/industrial designers/engineers) were given the link to
Setup Development Environment :: Concrete CMS and https://documentation.concretecms.org/9-x/developers/working-themes/introduction-bedrock they were overwhelmed. Most of them work in our computer lab, at home or at work as their workflow. They couldn’t simply deal with extra complexity of installing a dev environment in different locations for working on their projects.

Those few students with a coding background have used @afixia’s atomik clone. Thanks to @mesuva’s «theme styling tool» and other workarounds like @johnthefish’s «shim» and @TMdesign’s hint to How to Compile SCSS Code in Visual Studio Code | by Coding Carter | Medium they were finally able to get work done. Specially after all that fixing, rigging, testing and finding documentation in order to convert our old v8 themes, running on PHP 7.4.

We use now our own hybrid theme for CMS v.9 (with Bootstrap 5 and LESS!) and we’re quite happy with it and we do great things. We consider ConcreteCMS as the “Swiss-Army-Knife” developing tool and would love to make theming easier and therefore pull more non-tech users aboard.

I just wonder if brilliant Bedrock is too sophisticated normal users.

So, how is everybody else doing with Bedrock?

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Short answer, is I think it is too complex even for experienced developers.

The other drawback is that bootstrap is very bloated and Bedrock approach requires quite a few large css and js files which slows down page loading and rendering. When it comes to SEO and conversion optimisation every 100 lms makes a big difference.
I’m still working with the “old style” Elemental approach and it’s working well. The core team said that devs were under no obligation to use Bedrock. And while it’s technically impressive, the feasibility and practicality is lacking. The lack of Bedrock based themes is a reflection of this.
I’m working on new themes for the marketplace at the moment and they won’t be based on Bedrock.

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This is bigger than Bedrock. I’m 67 so perhaps I would have dropped from the scene anyway but when it became clear that concrete5 was moving away from the ‘Regular Joe’, I moved away as well… into retirement. I was drawn to concrete5 over a decade ago because the architecture made perfect sense to me. It ‘thought’ the way I thought. I was a long-time .NET guy and C5 was so compelling that I left that world behind instantly. The move away from the old forums and into Slack told me (I might be wrong) that this was an intentional move to rid themselves of boring, silly questions from hacks like me so I took them up on their offer and basically left. Cloning a theme used to take 10 minutes and required no more programming skills other than copying the files to the application folder and changing some text in the theme’s controller. Now? Kfrog says it best. Not even computer science students can figure it out. Recently, I have to use Perplexity.AI for coding advice rather than land on these forums which are basically useless now through apathy and atrophy. Sorry for the rant but Bedrock is but a symptom.

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My 5 cents on this topic: For me the easiest way to use Version 9.x with bedrock is to use the composer based installation of concrete and then apply bedrock to it.

The benefits for me: If I want to upgrade the concrete version I only have to login into my webhost via ssh and execute a ‘composer update’ (alternatively: composer require … a specific version of concrete).

And with bedrock I’m using the standard way of building themes. How the core team guys would do it. They know better than myself. In this approach the whole Sass stuff lives in resources/css.

So if you have knowledge in Sass (I never used Less. Never since version 5.6) and take a look at the examples of Dave from Afixia you can bring this to life. I’m really wondering that students can’t work with bedrock. I’m a finance guy, you know? :slight_smile:

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Composer has its place and appeals to “command prompt” kind of people. In a technology age where we’ve had a Windows based GUI since the early 90s, requiring developers to use a command prompt to build a simple website isn’t the most intuitive thing. I’m a GUI kind of guy and can only convince myself to use SSH when absolutely necessary.

Concrete became popular because of its intuitive structure and editing experience.

When that intuitive aspect is lost in the name of building something more complex, it alienates the cms from part of the user base that created it in the first place.

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If you look back through the forums, there are many examples of site owners who should have been using the web interface or a simple CLI install getting into trouble because they used the full php composer build without really understanding what they were doing.

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I didn’t think about it, but I think you’re right. If you can setup up your project with bedrock properly the next step is to compile the Sass files to CSS.

And for me the best way to do this is in the terminal. I don’t know if there are nice GUI apps which can do the compilation.

Seems like bedrock is for web developers who know the whole terminal stuff. For me it’s clear that I have to look at the package.json in a project (scripts section) to know what commands i can fire up in the terminal.

BTW: It’s totally worth it to have the web dev terminal knowledge with npm, git, webpack, browser-sync, Sass compilation for development, compilation for production…

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I 100% agree that tools like you mentioned (plus Gulp) are game-changers for the web development industry and make certain things possible that weren’t possible before. There’s no real native UI for some of those tools. For any new web devs, I’d definitely suggest learning those tools but there’s a learning curve and realistically, not everyone is going to be ready to invest the time and effort to pick up those skills. That raises the entry level for who can easily access Concrete, and Bedrock specifically. I’m concerned that is scaring away new community members who say this is just too hard.
It used to be easy to clone the Elemental theme but now Atomik is a whole other game.

In saying all that, I’m kinda late to the Sass game, and used it on my most recent add-on, Mega Menu 3.0, as well as in the rebuild of my website, c5extras.com. It certainly made life easier, but added layers of complexity too.
I feel bad that members like @mhawke have been turned off Concrete and felt left out. I firmly believe the platform has to be friendly for users with any skill level in order to succeed and rise back to where it was before in terms of user base. It’s a tough balance for the core team to add new features and keep up with the Joneses. But if members don’t provide feedback like this, then we can’t help shape the roadmap of this beautiful cms.

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Yeah, right. Concrete5 was built volunteers with ‘church’ websites on ultra-cheap shared hosing without SSH access. The marketplace had flourished with over 1800 add-ons (50% free) that were built basically by these volunteers. When all that free labour was disrespected (and continues to be disrespected by removing access to old stuff) then it alienates a LOT of people. Yes, I understand completely that tech gets more complex but these decisions on how to move forward had consequences, most of which were expressed deeply at the time. Saas systems will eat C5 alive when AI allows ‘regular joes’ in the office to build evermore sophisticated websites without knowing anything but drag-and-drop. My son is the Controller and data manager at a large automotive manufacturing firm and when I introduced him to Microsoft Power Automate a few years back, it DESTROYED the typical developer’s world in that company when they all transitioned into writing scripts for Power Automate. They’ve since left that behind for more and more powerful automation and would never think about hiring a PHP guy to build anything that looks remotely like concrete CMS does today. I’m a big-picture guy (which you all will become as you age) and sometimes, age affords a level of visibility not available while you’re in the trenches of the command line.

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I feel Bedrock is a sledghammer to crack a nut tbh, Themes always used to be the preserve of front end devs/designers, people who got by in code but had design chops and could make attractive looking sites, Add-ons were the territory of backend devs, and that set up made sense to me. I think bedrock would scare off anyone that has solid design skills but may only have minimal technical knowledge, exactly the people who would have made themes in the 5.6 era, I’m not saying that is the whole reason for the thin showing of themes, but I don’t think its helping.

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I started my career as a designer. I have learnt to code over the last 12 years and ConcreteCMS was the catalyst for this.

I use phpstorm because someone said try it over Dreamweaver and it switched to that.

All the themes that i have designed and built out over the past few years are bedrock based.

The first time I read the “how to” I was like this is a bit tough… But i did what it said and it worked.

I now take HTML and css written in less (my html guy loves less) and convert it into scss and chop up into themes. I feel bedrock is easy to work with.

If i didn’t use it then no bother i would just use less and bootstrap5. Its really not the be all and all for building themes.

I have said many times i am happy to run people through it and how i develop my themes, setup phpstorm and bedrock.

Maybe I should just do a video when i get a moment.

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Great idea! It will help a bunch of people.

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@VidalThemes @mhawke you both hit the nail on the head… Theme design is the domain of designers rather than developers. And bedrock requires a developer’s hat to understand.

I’m working on a new theme at the moment that isn’t using bedrock and trying out some new approaches to color treatment beyond the built in features of Concrete. There’s definitely plenty of room to innovate in this space. But I’m concerned as bedrock (and atomik) is being pushed to new users of concrete, many of them are getting turned off and say that’s just too hard.

The first rung at the bottom of the ladder is the most important.

I believe V10 would really benefit from a new bundled theme that had the best of elemental and atomik - simple to clone but styled for all the core blocks and using modern design techniques. I’m even willing to work on it.

We all want and benefit from a larger, more engaged community so these are the types of action points that need to be at the forefront of the roadmap so we grow in the direction we all want. And it will really help if we’re all in agreement. A unified push will be stronger.

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I finally built a bedrock theme this year. It’s actually not too bad once you get it setup. However, I feel it is way overkill in most scenarios. 95% of the time I just want to quickly tinker with the php/js/less without getting a whole dev env setup.

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Out of interest did you setup a local server and what editor do you uses. Where do you run you command lines?