Bootstrap 4 Support

We're excited about some of the new abilities in Bootstrap 4 and are certainly keeping a close eye on the development and adoption of it among our users. A major consideration for us when it comes to making a switch like this however is in ensuring WHMCS remains universally and easily adaptable and integratable into our customers existing websites, and for that reason we believe switching at this time would be premature. We will however be re-reviewing this regularly.

As you no doubt already know, as of 18 Jan 2018 Bootstrap 4 final was released so any hesitation because of alpha/beta status is no longer warranted. Please consider adopting Bootstrap 4 as soon as possible by leaving the six template as is, with only bugfixes, for those who need it and adding something like a "seven" template based on BS4. I'm sure the "community" would pitch in with plenty of patches. Thanks.

It might be fair to look at this closer in a few months. Most themes will now be moving to Bootstrap 4 now that it is marked stable.

It's important to be up to date with those structural components

As suggested previously, it would be nice to have a "Seven" theme - keeping "Six" with BS3 (for backward compatability) and the new "Seven" theme to move things forward. We have recently re-developed our main website in Bootstrap 4 and have had to develop the same theme twice in order to integrate with WHMCS' software.

Hi there,

Thanks for your suggestion. We are aware of Bootstrap 4's release earlier this year and have done some initial investigation. Due to the backwards incompatible nature of the changes, an entirely new template is necessary. It would also be necessary to re-write the order form templates for use with Bootstrap 4.

The semantic versioning we use would typically dictate that such backward-incompatible changes require a major version bump (eg. v8).

Due to these considerations, this isn't something we are able to implement today, but it's something we are interested in doing in the future.

Hi John,

Any ETA ?

BTW Backward compatibility still possible with Template six and Template seven can be bootstrap 4. I think WHMCS don't need the major release for this.

The seven theme suggestion above is perfect, would be great to see this inplemented!

Hi all,

Thanks for your continued comments.

A major consideration, in addition to creating a new main theme itself, are the order form templates. These are currently all designed for Bootstrap 3, and so would also need to be refactored (or an entirely new set created from scratch).

Presumably there would also need to be some kind of dependency system created to prevent an order form template being selected in conjunction with a theme designed for different Bootstrap versions.

This means that maintaining two themes for different versions of Bootstrap becomes technically complex very quickly. So the preferred option might be to go for a hard swap in a major version, rather than operating both side-by-side for several minor versions.

What are your thoughts on that approach?

A hard swap would be preferable if it's NOT going to take another

year to hit a stable release. If a copy of the six theme, and

orderforms, were "dumped" on Github with a small amount of custodial

guidance from WHMCS then I'm pretty sure the community would have

already done the grunt work and refactored the new theme to BS4 by now.

Along

with a refactoring, the concept of adding a different "child" theme

based on a parent theme, with only the changed tpl and css files in a

new child theme, would be a huge improvement. We have the general

Wordpress child-theme example as a guide. For me, I find I only need to

modify a dozen lines of template code so I am reluctant to make a mass

copy of the six theme because then I have to track template changes in

major updates otherwise my site breaks. I have found it's easier to

script sed edits to the templates after an update or fresh install so I

only have one small script to maintain. The custom.css file really helps

but the templates themselves need to be managed as a child-theme for

those of use who only need to modify less than 10% of the templates.

It's always struck me as odd, and I've been using whmcs since v3.x, that the order forms are cross theme. They should be rolled into the theme.

Duplication of template files could be perhaps mitigated against by implementing child themes that override the core theme. See how WordPress or Prestashop do this for example.

Another problem I've come across in removing bootstrap from themes is there is still html generated within whmcs. Ie. Some html output is not templated. It means we're stuck using Bootstrap and can't use anything lighter or more modern.

Or just move order form templates to within each theme?

Or implement proper theme overrides so you can have a core set of templates with only overrides in the theme where required instead duplicating every template file in every theme as you currently have to do. It would making upgrading easier as we wouldn't have to worry about an upgrade overwriting templates or having to diff template changes on every upgrade.

However, I'm not sure it would be possible to implement a BS3 & BS4 set of templates at the same time as there's still a significant chunk of html that gets generated within the whmcs code and is not templated. Last time I tried to strip out Bootstrap and replace it with something else, I quickly realised parts of it are impossible as it generates code containing bootstrap specific html & CSS classes before they hit the template tags. Until whmcs completely separates the view, we're stuck with bootstrap and possibly be at that.