Hi, this is Topher from the Magnolia product team. Starting a project with STK is not a "bad move" now - it’s a decision that depends on your project and team.
In brief: STK will continue to offer a comprehensive set of pages and components that provide a great foundation for a website. STK templates are a tremendous jump-start for a project - with excellent accessibility features and layout responsiveness. We're still using the STK templates in our demo project and teach it in our training because of the above benefits. As far as deprecation, STK may or may not be deprecated in 5.4, your post is based on comments on a wiki page - not an official announcement, and there is not a final decision yet. Even if it is deprecated, it will not disappear. We do not plan to invest much time in the set of templates included in STK. Still I foresee that some people will start projects with the new “minimal templating kit” that we will develop, but will then pick and choose useful components from the existing STK library. On the other hand, most core features of the STK module, like the site definition or themes, will be rolled into the core product. Much of your investment in learning STK will continue to be relevant even if you decide not to use the templates bundled with STK. The back story if you want more context: We've collected a lot of feedback during the years. It's clear that the STK approach is great for some projects and teams, but not for others. STK is opinionated, for example providing its own master HTML page. If a team is happy with the STK's 'opinions', great - you're off and running. But if a team has their own frontend framework they want to use - its a steep learning curve and can be challenging to adapt. This tradeoff is known and you can find more details in this STK whitepaper: http://www.magnolia-cms.com/resources-directory/tech-briefs/stk.html One of the problems we've identified with the STK is that it is overwhelming for beginners because there are simply too many components in there! Therefore in 5.4 we will create a new minimal set of templates that will demonstrate clearly how to use Magnolia templating and the flexibility and power that it provides. It will be a good foundation and will meet developers at the "sweet spot" between frontend HTML and server templating functionality. It will be developed in parallel to the STK so people can choose their starting point. * You count on Magnolia the company to provide you the best CMS features. We recently conducted interviews with Magnolia developers and learned about what works and what does not. Recently frontend web development has changed dramatically and there are many good frameworks for crafting websites and web experiences. People want to use these frameworks with Magnolia CMS. We're realizing that frontend trends develop so rapidly that our best position is to provide clean integration to them. Think of it as an extension of the Magnolia "Open Suite" approach where we promote our integration points on the server. (We "play nicely with others.") http://www.cmscritic.com/magnolias-open-suite-approach-maximizing-choice-future-proofing-digital-investments/ My goal is that the new minimal templating kit will be the base on which MANY specialized slim "template kits" can be developed (by magnolians or by community members) to provide close integrations to different frontend frameworks such as bootstrap, foundation, angularjs, polymer and "the next big thing". * So, I hope that you can get excited about the future of developing with Magnolia, at the same time as being disappointed. I know that you want Magnolia to continue to innovate and stay on the front edge of technology and best practices. It’s the nature of our business. If you want to learn more about what we are considering for front-end development, you could check this out: http://dev.magnolia-cms.com/blog/2014/03/frontend-vision/ We will keep you and all developers posted on actual decisions here on the forums and on the developer blog. Cheers, Topher ps. Just to be clear - the Announcements forum room is intended for actual announcements of new versions and modules, please do not use it for discussions. But I think it's good and totally valid that you brought up your concern on the forums. -- Context is everything: http://forum.magnolia-cms.com/forum/thread.html?threadId=5a63bb1f-43ba-4509-b9f4-4bb17661eb08 ---------------------------------------------------------------- For list details, see http://www.magnolia-cms.com/community/mailing-lists.html Alternatively, use our forums: http://forum.magnolia-cms.com/ To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <[email protected]> ----------------------------------------------------------------
