Newish to Sage - 8 or 9?

I’m just getting time to start learning Sage and all the related things that go into it, around it, under it, and through it.

Given that I’m a hobbyist starting from scratch would you guys recommend starting on 8 or 9? Scanning the Discourse makes it look like 9 is waay more complicated.

I’d recommend starting with 9. Some of the technology involved (namely Webpack and Blades) can be a little difficult to wrap your head around when you first open up the code, but once you’ve figured out how they work, they’ll make your workflow way, way better. My own development experience has been immeasurably enhanced by the templating Blades offer. Sage’s implementation of Webpack is very much “put in as much effort as you do or don’t want to”—it “just works” right out of the box, and you can get most stuff done without touching it. (And if they end up incorporating Laravel Mix, it’ll get even easier.) Blade looks complicated but is pretty simple, and has lots of great documentation on the Laravel site. When I decided it was time to learn Sage 9 I just spun it up instead of Sage 8 for a new project, dove in, and never regretted it. My personal feeling is that it looks a little scarier than it is. :wink:

Also, Sage 8 depends somewhat heavily on Bower, which is kind of dead software walking: It’s still being maintained, but the maintainers recommend moving somewhere else. So if you’re just starting down the path, you’ll be building knowledge of a tool that was obsolete before you even picked it up.

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Thanks! Those sound like some great reasons for getting in on 9.

Id agree with always blank, I am fairly new but find Sage 9 much easier than 8. The tools are much more efficient and webpack is great with it being already set up (I dont bother setting up webpack from scratch, it takes hours!) Just set up your 2 headers such as header.blade and header.front, for example ( 1 for front page and one for the rest) which might be appropriate for most projects, put conditional in app.blade and you are good to go. Its easy to add custom pages in views and select them in WP-Admin. A lot better than the official WP methods.

PS, for Font Awesome just put a link to cdn in head.blade!

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