Hi Guys,
There's a bunch of stuff going on in this thread. I'll try to address each point, apologies if I miss something.
> Bootstrap is great
> Therefore you should use it in the CMS
As an advocate of Bootstrap, I can see why you might think that. However as an advocate of SilverStripe I disagree.
We've decided the CMS should be a desktop style web application, and bootstrap is fundamentally not designed that way.
Most of the features that bootstrap provides (a responsive grid, attractive typography, a good default set of components for front end use) are not useful in the CMS as designed. We don't use a grid. We don't really need typography, except what comes from the front-end theme. And the components provided that we would use are also provided by other libraries which we need to provide features bootstrap doesn't.
Most of the features that we do need for the CMS (Ingo has already provided a list, I'm not going to go through it again) are not provided by Bootstrap
Is not a CMS? I haven't used it personally, but as far as I can tell it is a theme framework, very similar (if more developed) to the SilverStripe express theme I linked to above.
It does integrate with a CMS (either Joomla or Wordpress) to provide some GUI elements for theme control, but doesn't provide any actual CMS interface (no site structure control, no page contents editing, certainly no ModelAdmin equivalent)
> But... jQuery UI is heavy
Yes, it is. But it provides features we need, and bootstrap doesn't.
> Open discussion about replacing CMS completely with something lighter, either based on bootstrap, or on ExtJS / AngularJS
One of the reasons we tried to make sure you could remove / replace the CMS module in 3.0 was so that people could replace it if so desired. The current 3.0 CMS is designed to be usable for a large cross section of possible site sizes and requirements, but there is certainly a place for a lighter CMS optimised for smaller sites. I would love to see alternative CMS modules show up.
However we've already put a lot of engineering effort into developing 3.0. We are almost certainly not to put any internal resource into developing an alternative CMS implementation any time soon.
One note on ExtJS in particular: it is under the GPL, and therefore not distribute-able as part of SilverStripe (which is under the BSD license).
> You should use elRTE instead of TinyMCE
I hadn't seen that before, and it looks quite nice. Thanks for bringing it to my attention
TinyMCE is definitely heavy. When we started work on 3.0 we evaluated all the (BSD license compatibile) open source editors hoping for a lighter weight replacement. However we found none that met our (pretty limited) absolutely required features list. This amongst other reasons resulted in us giving up on in-place click-to-edit editing, since TinyMCE couldn't be instantiated fast enough to give a nice UX.
elRTE fails to meet some of those absolutely required features. In particular it doesn't appear to have a significant enough community behind it, and it seems development on it has stagnated. The latest commit to Github was 7 months ago, and there hasn't been a stable release in over a year. We (SilverStripe) don't want to have to take on support of a WSYIWYG editor component too.
Where I would love to see some work done is to improve 3.0's WYSIWYG integration API so that people who wanted to experiment with alternatives could. This is trickier than it first looks, since we have our own custom file / image / link editors that need to be integrated with whatever tool you use, but is technically feasible. If a community member wanted to take this on, that'd be awesome.
There's also a long standing bug which doesn't allow you to use more than one TinyMCE configuration in the CMS at any one time, which makes using lighter toolbar configurations tricky. I might take another look at fixing that soon.
Hamish Friedlander