CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

The Joomla team has worked (and argued) hard about selecting a common toolkit for administrative UI development. Twitter Bootstrap 'won' the contest, meaning that Joomla 3.0 has a very standardized set of building blocks to construct a component with. It's true that there are certain drawbacks to 'limiting' the developer to a single toolkit, but given the wealth of options available in jQuery + Bootstrap, it's hardly unfair -- to most developers, it's kind of a challenge to create an intuitive UI instead of just upgrading/fixing the stuff they did for Joomla 2.5.

Enter CiviCRM. Multi-CMS makes it harder to rewrite 'the' UI unless you're a masochist and want to redo all of the Smarty templates. However, not many Joomla users will call the CiviCRM UI sexy, pleasant or modern -- no offense to the people who worked long and hard on it -- so I'm trying to find out what the CiviCRM team thinks of the future UI direction. Is something like Bootstrap being considered ? Anyone interested in co-theming the admin environment for Joomla ?

At first sight, I'ld take a stab at the joomla.css and override some more of the civicrm.css styles, but I don't think I'll get away with not touching some of the templates. I would prefer to avoid double work by first asking if there are any plans to address the CiviCRM UI in any of the future versions.

And yes, I know, Bootstrap would probably break at least Joomla's default admin template, but with 3.0 on the playing field, now seems to be a good moment to get ready ...