In 2011 Aladar and I attended the Joomla and Beyond event in Germany.
At the event a demonstration was made of the (at the time) new CSS & Javascript framework of Bootstrap 2, with the proposal that Bootstrap be integrated into the upcoming version of Joomla.
In those days, building an extension for Joomla was a nightmare because so many different template builders had their own way of doing things. Styling for an extension was always a little hit and miss, what worked on one Joomla template wouldn't work on another so when we saw the Bootstrap proposal Aladar and I immediately grasped it's significance. We would finally have a set of tools that we could use to build Jomres, and we could always trust that the CSS & Javascript features we wanted would, in the vast majority of templates, be available. If they weren't we could rightfully blame the template and not Jomres if something didn't work as expected. The truth is I am a terrible designer, so being able to trust the CMS's theme/template was exactly what we didn't know we were wishing for, for years.
Fast forward a half a decade and a bit (2017) and Joomla 4 was announced, and with it the news that J4 would use Bootstrap 4. This was good news because soon after Joomla 3 was released with Bootstrap 2, Bootstrap 3 was released, forcing us to include a new set of template files in Jomres, it's Bootstrap 3 template set. The fact was that BS3 was miles better than BS2 for it's small screen handling, so when we released our Leohtian template for Jomres it was built Bootstrap 3, not Bootstrap 2. It was, however a lot of work to maintain 2 template sets in quick succession, so that Jomres would work with both BS2 and BS3, so when Joomla 4's news of using Bootstrap 4 arrived I decided to wait until Joomla 4 was at Release Candidate before formally supporting Bootstrap 4. in the meantime I added the template set, and did a lot of work to ensure that Jomres would work in Joomla 4 Betas, but officially Jomres doesn't support Bootstrap 4 yet because there are still some niggles to work out in the html/css/javascript of that template set.
Joomla 4's release has been slow (quite honestly, that's been a godsend to me, I've been so busy with real life that I would have been hard pressed to finish the BS4 template set last year), and at the beginning of this year (2021) it was announced that Joomla 4 will be released with the newest flavour of Bootstrap, Bootstrap 5.
This is, in my opinion, an excellent idea, and one that I fully support. BS5, although it's still in Beta should be feature complete and it's right to include it in J4. It resolves the problems that we saw 10 years ago with trying to support multiple versions of Bootstrap, and will be far less confusing for users of Joomla.
Where does this leave Jomres?
As I said, right now Jomres has a Bootstrap 4 template set that is not working entirely to my satisfaction. Because of the J4 announcement I have instead started working on a BS5 template set which is already in the Nightly build. Again, this set still needs some work, but thankfully a lot of the BS4 work I did can be ported to the BS5 template set so the workload shouldn't be as heavy. Once Joomla 4 goes to Release Candidate I will be able to be confident that nothing will change significantly and I can finish the Bootstrap 5 template set. Once that has happened, I will remove the Bootstrap 4 template set. This means, at that time Jomres will formally support Bootstrap 2, Bootstrap 3 and Bootstrap 5.
I hope that that's not too confusing for you.
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