So, I realize this may be considered an unnecesary thread for most, but I hope not.
Like the title says, is SAGE 9 stable enough for me to develop client websites based on it ? Is the learning curve worth it right now or are there going to be a lo of changes from this version until it finally goes live?
Will try to elaborate a bit on my concerns without taking too much of your time:
I’m a web noob. I just recently started with web & programming not too long ago and I have been building sites with the Sage theme for about 2 months now.
I consider myself still getting the hang of most the stuff in SAGE 8 like bower and gulp (which I had to go read about before even considering using SAGE in the first place), etc…
For SAGE 9 which I noticed is now moved to the master branch of the repo, I’d have to use webpack (same situation I found myself a couple months ago with bower, node and gulp, I know nothing about it).
I guess my question basically gets down to:
Is it worth it for me to start learning all these new fancy stuff and develop sites on the new sage 9 or should I just wait a bit for it to get more stable and then invest my time on it? I don’t have that much spare time as of right now…
Thanks in advance for any insights or opinions on the subject, really appreciate your thoughts.
As with any pre-release, the purpose of our Sage 9 pre-releases is to let the public test our code and provide us with feedback and bug reports. Documentation is incomplete, and you’re pretty much on your own with figuring out how undocumented things work. Our pre-releases are still considered alpha. There are two things that means: (1) we WILL introduce breaking changes at some point, and (2) you WILL run into unresolved bugs.
You should only use Sage 9 if you’re cool with developing your own workarounds for problems you encounter, and you shouldn’t expect much from us as far as support is concerned unless you’re reporting an actual bug. And if you like to keep up with upstream changes, you should anticipate that being a considerable amount of work.
So if you’re cool with the extra work that will go into using Sage 9 in its current state, then go for it. Otherwise just stick with Sage 8 for now.
Reason I’m asking: Need to build a new site in the next month or two. If it’s expected to be released by then, then would like use it (realizing that it’s caveat emptor for the next 2 months). If it’s more likely released 4-6+ months, then seems like sage 8 would be a better choice.
Thanks in advance and for creating such useful frameworks.
Personally I am playing with Sage 9 but for my workplace where we have just moved to the Roots stack from a old fork of Sage, custom vm, and Bedrock. I elected to keep us on the 8.4 branch going forward for our client work.
I’ve taken a similar tack for client work. We typically need to turn client sites around pretty quickly and the tried and true nature of Sage 8 is helpful here. And since we’re going to be supporting a large number of Sage 8 sites going into the future regardless, what’s a few more while we wait for Sage 9 to stabilize?
Has anyone tried deploying a staging environment with Sage 9? I am a confused by the fact that build-before.yml still has gulp and bower referenced and I keep getting an error involving symlinks. I am starting to wonder if maybe I should go back to version 8 since there is not as much documentation and troubleshooting threads to use as reference.
I’m not a trellis user, but for what I can tell, since gulp has been dropped in favour of npm, you can simply remove/comment that section of the build-before and let npm take care of the build process. There should be no other steps involved for what I can see.
I’ve said it in other threads before and I’ll say it again, Sage 9 is totally usable right now. The major changes concern Bootstrap 4 (still in alpha hell) and the new build process. Everything else is pretty much like it is in 8.
You do need to get familiar with webpack and NPM if you’re new to it (or coming from Gulp / Sage 8.) But it’s not that daunting and in fact I have come to like using NPM more than Bower / Gulp. The docs are starting to come together on the Sage github page so take a look there to get started.
I will give it a shot after I finish some urgent projects I’ve been working on for the past month, after that I’ll have the time to get that over with. Thanks all for your thoughts and inputs… I am wondering now if they are planning to make a new book for the version 9 of the theme? I bought the book for sage 8 and it helped me get around, would be nice to have a book for version 9 as well.
I agree. I think Sage 9 is completely useable. I had a slightly slower getting up to speed but am at normal efficiency now. It was my first time getting Trellis up and running, and that consumed a chunk of time. But for agency and client work I’ll be blowing away my local Homebrew + remote ServerPilot stacks now.
Same problem here. I’m using Sage 8.5.3 but I’m concerning about Bootstrap beta2. I need it for the columns offset mainly (they removed in beta1) but since they have dropped the support from Bower I don’t know how to upgrade it without pain. I’m thinking to restart the project in Sage 9 but I’m not sure is stable enough for a client site.
I’ve launched two sites (https://www.droid-life.com/ & https://www.enduranceresearch.com/) and I’m prepping to launch a third built on Sage 9. It’s stable enough for production use, you just need to be prepared to sand down a few sharp edges occasionally.
@alwaysblank What do you mean as “few sharp edges occasionally”? Just for understand if I can switch to Sage right now (my project is still at the beginning).
It means that Sage 9 is a piece of software that is
in progress
built by volunteers
It works (quite well) but you’re going to run into some issues while you develop that you’ll need to be able to solve on your own. In terms of “stability” it’s perfectly ready for a production environment; it’s the development experience you may find a bit rough if you’re not prepared to get your hands dirty. IMO it’s very much worth figuring out, and so far I’ve never run into a wrinkle that I haven’t been able to iron out on my own or with the help of this forum, but the cooler features of Sage 9 (webpack, blade – and the controller, by extension) are a big break from 8, and documentation, quirks, etc, haven’t all been addressed or collected in one place.
