Updating themes from V8 to V9 without Bedrock

Developing with Concrete
1

I have spent a lot of time looking at available Bedrock Themes and reading about how to build a Bedrock theme or clone an existing Bedrock theme. I am finding that the Bedrock V9 themes do not accommodate the styling of my current site, which contains many customized blocks. Honestly, I think trying to build or clone a Bedrock theme is beyond my current abilities.

Thankfully there have been many posts and even some documentation, such as “Updating Concrete Thems from Version 8 to Version 9” (Updating Concrete Themes from Version 8 to Version 9 :: Concrete CMS) that indicate you do not need to rebuild your theme using Bedrock when you upgrade to Version 9.

What I can’t find is any posts that list the steps to successfully use a V8 theme in V9.

Here is what I think needs to be done. (Note – everything will be done on a development site first.)

  1. Update the site to version 9 while staying on php 7.4.

  2. As part of the upgrade, update my theme’s header file to point to the javascript file for bootstrap version 5 and latest version of the jquery along with a basic version of bootstrap-modified.css that handles the styling for the dashboard. Not sure of the best source of the css file – possibly use the bootstrap-modified.css from the elemental theme file in the latest version 9.3.9 download??

  3. Update my version of the page_theme.php to match the new asset classes.

  4. I then need to load the styles (getStylesheet) from my V8 site using the main.less file.
    Also change the base font size to 16px so the dashboard displays correctly.

Based on various posts there will be some modifications needed for font awesome and looking for other possible errors (for example I have seen posts talking about how the accordian and tabs have a few issues).

After that I will need to upgrade to PHP 8 and fix errors resulting from incompatibilities between the two PHP versions.

Is this how others have gotten their V8 themes to work on V9 without Bedrock? Am I missing any important steps?

The other option is to hire someone to upgrade my theme to Bedrock…

I would really love to upgrade my site to V9 but don’t want to try until I have more confidence that I know how to get my V8 theme working on V9.

2

Just a few things:
If your styling impacts the dashboard there is something wrong with your styling. Front pages should all be wrapped in a DIV with class name ccm-page. You should then use that class in all your styling so it doesn’t impact the dashboard.

If you have block templates in application\blocks they should also be updated as there have been a few modifications in blocks between versions.

3

Thank you for he quick reply. I checked and luckily the person who did my theme has everything wrapped with the ccm-page class. Thanks for the reminder about the application blocks. I know that I will need to address issues with asset changes.

4

@dgreer

I already fixed some v8 themes compatible with v9.

You can refer to the commit logs of those repositories.