I am with john, it isn’t hard and guess what!! You dont have to use it. You can still take those other themes that are there in the core and copy them and build out a theme just like you always have. But bedrock offers something greater.
Its a nice to have not a must have.
I guess I understand the discussion between full fledged coders and creative non coders.
I also teach Concrete (among other Systems) in classes, similar to user @kfog. Many students have abandoned Concrete in the last two years. They rather pay 80€/year for DIVI or similar and don’t need to bother with the Concrete overhead issues. A sad move, in my opinion.
Its sad that teaching/students are slipping away because of this. As students graduate and get jobs, they take experience of the tools they have been exposed to with them.
Unfortunately what was described earlier feels like a broader problem about ICT skills weakening over time.
I was an ICT teacher for a few years, quite a number of years back now, but I still keep an interest .
I was reading recently that many younger students are now struggling with the very basics of more traditional computing, things like using a mouse, or even understanding that not all screens are touch screens. They’ve experienced nothing but phones and tablets, and naturally that’s all they know. Older kids are struggling with the concepts managing files, as again they’re only ever tapping away at apps that save things to some unknown location. I saw a bit of that myself teaching, but that was 15 or so years ago.
That’s all understandable as a generational shift, but then the issue is that you add on top the now much lower attention spans kids have, and you end up with much of the basics which are still very important being dismissed as ‘old’ or not needed. And kids then get frustrated with processes that might take a bit more mental investment.
So it doesn’t surprise me that students are electing to go with website builders, over tasks where they might need to code or configure things more. It’s a path of least resistance. It’s just that unfortunately resistance if often where all the good learning and problem solving is.
TLDR: get off my lawn
Although I am a real life ‘cranky old man’ so I’m allowed to say, “Get off my lawn”, I’m also a 30-year youth volleyball coach and if I talk about some complicated volleyball concept for more than 30 seconds these days, I lose their attention. Their eyes literally glass over. I have adapted my style to be teaching within the chaos of playing. It’s made me a better coach because they learn better within the context of real play (just like I learn best from code examples not some philosophical description of a platform’s architecture) but the transition for me as a coach took a few seasons. Now I’m the Technical Director at our small club and my main message to new coaches is, “Shut up. They aren’t listening anyway. Teach while they play”. Where does this fit into this discussion? How quickly can a developer feel ‘productive’. How fast can they create a fully functioning ‘Hello World’. I’m not talking about CS students in school because they are forced to at least engage or they fail. I’m talking about a freelancer who dips their toe into an unfamiliar platform. Quite honestly, I’m the same way. I create an account and try out a new API for perhaps 15 minutes and if I can’t see myself getting productive quickly, I’ll try something else. Someone MUST be making this functionality quick and easy and most of the time, I find it. As I mentioned, that’s how I originally came to c5. I dipped my toe in and it made sense fast enough for me to commit my time. Now? I doubt I would invest the time.
Thank you Ryan and Michael for your honest posts.
I think it is not just a generation issue. It’s not, that the students are not interested, it’s us, making complex options and extras available. It’s good old confusion and “digital fatigue” – in many parts of today’s tech-filled life.
I don’t want this discussion too much off topic. I simply wondered, why is my initial topic discussion so popular and why are there only a few Bedrock themes after three years of its introduction.
BTW: Our students are adults, they understand the basic workflow with css, html, js and PHP etc. but they are no programmers with coding experience like npm, Ruby, PHP or Laravel etc.
Is it OK to work with all these old themes?
What if you want progressive development and design? Bootstrap 3 is old, reached end of life. So is Bootstrap 4, even Bootstrap NES is old.
Bedrock needs Bootstrap 5. I’m afraid v.10 will cut older BS.
I appreciate the open and honest discussion. My understanding of the current situation is:
@afixia did some great work in creating the Basic Bedrock “clone” or starting point (can’t thank you enough) and that’s been packaged up and listed in the marketplace to address some concerns that there weren’t easy ways to get started with Bedrock themes. There’s also a detailed tutorial on cloning and customizing Atomik here.
There’s an entire free book on how to build a site using Concrete, including a section on themes and SASS. I acknowledge that this came out before Bedrock, but the concepts and techniques there were part of the reason why Bedrock was created, so it’s only 1-2 more steps from there to build with Bedrock.
There’s also the push and pull of things becoming easier and harder which is not limited to Concrete. Technology is getting more complex which makes things harder, but there’s a demand that things should also become easier. Making inherently complex tasks easy and intuitive for every use case takes time and money, both of which are extremely limited (and might also lead to some hard business decisions that don’t appeal to everyone).
Then there’s also the issue of changes in PHP 8 which broke lots of code around the same time and the fact that Bedrock is not a requirement to make themes, it’s certainly understandable that this can become a nebulous discussion.
So my question is: what additional actionable steps can be taken by the community to address some of the issues in this and related threads? Bear in mind that that money and time are extremely limited and a significant portion of Concrete-related development happens thanks to the volunteer effort of community members or as a byproduct of clients paying for development to meet their own commercial needs.
I think this is a great way to approach this discussion, it has to be forward looking. Bedrock is/was just a tool offered to theme developers, it was never intended to be some sort of common-denominator starting point.
So in terms of moving forward with Concrete themes, I think it’s worth thinking about how a lot of other CMS have ‘starter kits’, and those tend to be created by the community.
I built a very simple one nearly a decade ago for 5.7:
And I know it was used by a few theme developers. It had some sass in it, but compiling the sass wasn’t a requirement, just add your own CSS.
And I also put out this:
Which is as simple as possible a Concrete theme can be, but heavily commented to explain why things are set up the way they are.
That could be taken, easily cloned to a new theme, and you’d start with your own CSS.
They’re only modest contributions, not fully-fledged starter kits.
I think it actually is more about CSS approaches and frameworks than anything else. There’s many ways to go about building a Concrete theme:
So the question is: can the community develop some sort of ‘starter kit’, that covers a wide range of abilities and use-cases?
Would it be Bootstrap based, or maybe something else?
Would it require Sass to be used? Javascript compilation?
Would it have a defined look-and-feel, and with lots of configuration options, or, would it really just be a blank canvas?
Would it have things like menus and more complex block templates included, or would it just handle the layouts?
I think those are quite difficult questions, and I think the simple answer is that there’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all. That’s why other CMS often have many different starter kits.
It’s all well and good for someone to say ‘I find Bedrock confusing’, but what do novices actually want in terms of something to start themes from?
I’m very heartened to see the direction which this conversation is taking. It’s heading towards something actionable that can make Concrete far more compelling for new users. And we’re all raising very important questions. If there are multiple people working to make this happen then it will help to have a common game plan to work from otherwise things start going in different directions and it all unravels.
I would imagine that the solution will be at least 3 (maybe 5) separate starter kits which different focuses, aimed at different solutions or users. Once the user chooses the kit that best fits then, then it’s time to move onto the next step - duplicating and making it their own. They need to be able to see the end result as quickly as possible. 10 minutes is the goal. 15 minutes is the maximum. Anything longer and we’ve lost them. Like others here, that is what drew me into Concrete in the first place.
Perhaps we can agree on a few fundamentals first, and then build a plan on that? Each volunteer involved can work on their own starter kit and we can compare and make suggestions along the way.
Some overarching features and concepts to demonstrate:
Concrete works in a wide range of scenarios, so the starting kits should resemble real-work use cases (such as landing page, basic brochure, portfolio, bigger organisation, blog/magazine, membership, etc). I don’t know if we want to go as far as intranet.
You don’t need more than 1 page of basic documentation to get up and running in the simplest form (max 2-3 mins reading an article or intro video). More comprehensive documentation is already there - but it’s not necessary to read a book before users write 1 line of code.
Concrete is CSS framework agnostic: create different starter kits based on different frameworks (this will draw in more designers who are already familiar with their favourite framework). Use defined scopes to avoid conflicts with Concrete’s UI.
The look-and-feel is easy to change for both technical and non-technical users (including a range of containers/layouts). Make as many elements easily editable in terms of color.
Use DRY design concepts in CSS or SASS variables.
SASS/LESS should be optional (precompiled CSS is included). If designers are comfortable with it they can extend it further and for users that prefer straight CSS, they’ve got that.
Supporting styling for all core blocks is essential.
Full responsive design support - this is 2024, and the most common devices for accessing the internet is smartphones.
Supporting key fundamentals of inclusive modern web design as much as possible: dark mode support (maybe the most basic starter kit won’t need this), RTL support, strive towards WCAG 2.2 compliance (as close as possible, even if it’s not perfect - at least be mindful of accessibility).
Each theme must be easy to duplicate and customize to get something decent looking up and running within the target time. The more complex starter kits might take longer.
This is all a starting point for the discussion - feel free to add/edit/remove, and let’s see what we can come up with!
That is all great stuff here.
How about adding all that on the missing Page “For Designers” ?
Plus:
How do we make Concrete attractive for the younger generation or the less experienced? How do we keep them interested? How do we make them participate in the forums and make their voices heard?
Dear fellow Concreteers
The steady drop of students using Concrete in our class since v.9 is the main reason that we’re not going to have Concrete available anymore. Unfortunately the school board has decided to drop other US based software/services as of Jan. 20st. This is a severe decision, we have no idea how to comply with it.
Thank you all for replying to this topic. I guess that among many great contributions @JohnTheFish’s post would be the most correct answer.
I want to close this discussion with a screenshot of “Bedrock” - home of the Flintstones. It shows a top modern Bedrock City. But note, there are only very few cars on that freeway, - only one car on each lane, with lots of spacing between them.
Thank you and good luck to all of you.
