Dear Community,
today we are announcing the update of our storefront dependency from Bootstrap 4.3.1 to 5.1.3 in our next major release. The good news is that you can already take advantage of it today!
Expect a smooth technical update with no visible changes when you update Shopware to the latest minor version or update the trunk branch, as it will continue to run on Bootstrap 4, which remains the default version. Our Bootstrap 5 implementation is deactivated and hidden behind a major feature flag, meaning we implemented the update in the platform instead of running a parallel storefront. With the next major release 6.5.0.0, the storefront will run on Bootstrap v5 by default.
Purpose
By making this functionality available to you today, you can already preview what you can expect from a storefront running Bootstrap 5. It also gives you time to prepare your extensions for the updated version. Please note that enabling this feature isn't recommended for production environments. More instructions and more information on how to update your extensions will follow soon.
Enabling the Bootstrap 5 feature
The Bootstrap update has been developed behind our major feature flag system, which enables not yet released major features. It can be enabled by activating the flag `V6_5_0_0` in your `.env` or `psh.yaml.override`. Once you have done that, you need to rebuild the storefront using `psh.phar storefront:build`. During this process, webpack should display a warning that Bootstrap v5 is being used – you'll also see this information in your browser's developer tools/console. If the Bootstrap v5 resources aren't built, please run `bin/console feature:dump` and try again.
IE11 support will be discontinued and jQuery will be removed
When moving forward, things fall by the wayside. In the case of Shopware 6.5.0.0, that means removing jQuery from the storefront and dropping the support for Internet Explorer 11.
Microsoft will no longer support the latter as of June 15, 2022, but there will still be legacy installations. Still, a web browser without proper vendor support poses a security risk. Therefore, it isn't a good idea to use it for online purchases.
By discontinuing the support for Internet Explorer 11, we can use newer front-end technologies and speed up development by not having to polyfill and test.
Removing jQuery is a different story. There's nothing wrong with it, but the convenience aspect that many people value is also present in vanilla Javascript.
That being said, jQuery isn't used in Shopware's Storefront of Shopware, and if you need it in your theme or app, you can always add it back in. However, we recommend that you don't do this, as the current ECMAScript specification has a lot of nice things to offer.
In case you still need jQuery, we provide guidance in the affiliate upgrade.md
When developing Shopware, one of our goals always is to stay up to date. With Shopware 6.5.0.0, you get just that. A version that removes legacy libraries and updates one of the storefront cornerpieces to the latest version. We hope that you, as a community, will seize the opportunity and take advantage of it by creating excellent extensions as always.
