Themes: Making these "Version 9 Ready"

Does anyone have any guidance/guidelines on the workflow required to upgrade a theme to v9?

Is the gulf between Concrete v9 and earlier versions that wide?

It depends heavily on the theme tbh, but here’s our take on things:

If it’s a pretty basic theme, then chances are you don’t need to do anything at all, as the older customiser still recognises LESS files.

If the theme has demo data, there is currently a bug that means it fails if you attempt to install it over the top of Atomik theme, its fine installing over Elemental. This is fixed in 9.0.2 which is yet to be released.

If the theme comes with blocks that rely on Jquery, you may encounter some issues with the built in version of Jquery as its now bang up to date, so if you have some older plugins its something to consider, but this is usually an easy fix.

There has been some changes to libraries that Concrete uses, so if you have packaged blocks that use stuff like Select2 you may need to include it yourself, or find an alternative.

The internal copy of Bootstrap has been updated so if your theme has dashboard pages the styling may need sorting out, again depending on how complex they are you may need no changes or they may need a complete overhaul.

The basics of theme creation have not changed, its only when your theme starts to get a bit more complex that you are going to start running into challenges.

Speaking from experience, we are about 95% there getting Modena ready for V9 and most of the things we have had to change is to do with our packaged blocks, the theme itself was largley unaffected, bar a few minor changes.

Thanks for your feedback

I’m not a theme developer, so some of this sounds complex, to me at least :frowning:

I’m currently migrating my v5.6 site to v9; but with v9 theme so rare at the minute I’m investigating options.

Modena looks to be a fully-featured product, so I’d be interested to know when you complete your changes

Thanks again

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