Moving Forward with HTMX integration.

[pdelboca]

It looks that there is a kind of agreement to use HTMX as core technology for CKAN 3.0: #7524

I would like to start doing some work but before that I think it would be nice to define some design principles that will lead and align the upcoming work (and expectations).

Mostly, I'm expecting a definition (before starting to work) on what do we want to maintain and what are we going to remove. Our front-end codebase is full of JS modules and CSS classes written 12 years ago that probably doesn't make sense anymore.

I will propose some Design Principles as statements and then we can iterate or review them. (Base on having the less amount of code to maintain)

Design Principles

The new frontend should rely only on what Bootstrap 5 and Jinja provides since it will create a friendly environment to new comers to CKAN. (They will not need to understand CKAN's way to do Front-End)

• We are gonna use Bootstrap 5 for front-end stuff.
• We are gonna deprecate our macros and use Bootstrap Forms instead.
• CKAN 3.0 will ship with default Bootstrap 5 theme.
• Keep our most CKANist snippets as a base for 3.0. [1]

Remaining thoughts

• Are we planning on some kind of backwards compatibility or none?
• Let's create an initial list of what needs to be maintained and should be kept for CKAN 3.0.
• I would like to completely refactor and split Group/Organizations blueprints. Simplify them but I'm sure there is something behind the abstraction of those blueprints.

Let me know your toughts!

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[1] I think that we should keep the most iconic snippets and layouts that are key to the CKAN Brand: dataset search, resource_item.html, etc. I think they could be nice building blocks for CKAN 3.0.

[pdelboca]

Some agreements made in the Technical Meeting:

• We are going for an early integration of HTMX into CKAN 2.X before thinking on CKAN 3.0.
• Macros are gonna be kept.
• A refactor of Group/Organization blueprints into separated logics would be ideal.
• We are going to focus on reduce the level of deep in our blocks hierarchy while integrating HTMX.
• Focus on cleaning our old JS libraries.
• Try to remove JQuery as a dependency of the project since it is no longer required for Boostrap 5.

Next steps:

1. Remove all code related to Bootstrap 3
2. Start a new branch with the integration of HTMX
3. Bring some of the work made in https://github.com/pdelboca/ckanext-htmx-demo to the branch
4. New showcase and review of the work done.