Skeleton v5 - Preview & RFC

[endigo9740]

Hey everyone, Chris here from the Skeleton team. After a bit of a hiatus, I'm happy to announce that the team and I are starting preparations for a new major update to Skeleton this week! Going forward, we'll refer to these updates as Skeleton "next" or "v5".

To provide some context, the Skeleton v3 update was massive overhaul that saw nearly ever line of Skeleton rewritten from the ground up, while defining the foundation of modern Skeleton. The v4 update focused on refining and stabilizing our component APIs (one half of the library). The result is we're now ready to focus on improvements to themes and of core features such as the design system (the most critical half of the library).

To put some concerns to rest, this will be a sizable update (hence the major version designation) but will not be as dramatic as the prior major releases. In fact we expect the majority of the migration to be handled via tooling (such as the CLI). We'll also likely provide some additional optional guidance for those of you that make use of LLMs.

That said, let's cover what v5 will entail.

Proposal

View the Full Proposal Document

As typical for a major release, we have prepared a full document covering all proposed updates and improvements. Check the link above to review this information in detail. Otherwise we've provided a brief summary below:

Themes

• Resolve a few notable issues introduced during the jump to Tailwind v4
• The introduction of new or extended properties (such as extending the color palette)
• Updating and improving the theme format to prepare for v5 and future updates

Theme Generator

• Provide support for generating v5 themes, as well as migration from legacy formats
• The app will become a full fledge cloud-based service (allowing you to login, manage themes, etc)
• And will serve as a foundation for some really big ideas we have planned for the future

Design System

• Updates and additions to our selection of Tailwind Components
• Refined aesthetics and structure improvements
• And again continue to establish a foundation for the future

We don't state this explicitly in the proposal document, but of course expect a number of bugfixes and documentation improvements. Both of which are mainstays in our major updates. Specific tasks can be tracked in our v5 Milestone.

Contributing to v5

I'd like to use this announcement to remind everyone that Skeleton is built and maintain by volunteers (myself included). Skeleton exists primary as a result of a community of folks coming together to build and maintain it. If you're interested in joining that process, please see our contribution guidelines. You may also reach out in our Contribution channel on Discord. And of course keep an eye out for new issues popping up here on Github marked "great first issue" or "help wanted". These will be ideal for new contributors. I only ask you give us a couple weeks from this point to get our process established before you join in.

End of Life for Skeleton v4

As typical when we kick off a new major release I want to make it clear that the Skeleton dev team is very small. We do not have the resources to build and maintain multiple versions in parallel. With kick off of v5 this week, we will be halting new development and releases targeting Skeleton v4 over the next few days. Note that Skeleton v4 will remain fully functional and available to you, just as it is now. Please also be aware that development and bugfixes for Skeleton will continue, these will just be grouped into the upcoming v5 release. We do reserve the ability to provide an emergency hotfix if a major breaking issue is discovered in the v4 branch. However, this will be only in extreme situations.

Request for Comment

Finally, please know we release this information publicly to help gather the community's thoughts and feedback. While we feel very confident of all proposed changes - may of which are based on fixes or features requested by you - we would still love to give everyone a chance to chime in. After all, we're building Skeleton for you!

If you have questions, feedback, concern, or just wish to express encouragement for the proposals here - then please feel free to leave a post in the comment section below. You may also reach out on Discord in either the Community Chat or Contributor channels. We'll do our best to follow up promptly.

We've very excited about the new updates, and hope everyone is as well. Thanks again for your continued support!