Posted under Angular & PrimeNG & Web
Permalink
The PrimeNG changelog states that as of 8.0.0-rc1, the old theming architecture based on Themeroller is being removed completely in favour of the new theme architecture and designer, as per change #7762.
The new theme architecture looks much more fully functional, and the designer looks a good and powerful tool.
A number of themes are paid for and not open source, as before which is fine and not a problem.
The designer itself is also paid for, which is perhaps slightly sad but not a real problem if you can roll your own themes directly in SCSS, e.g. by adapting a free theme as I have done in the past.
However, the big frustration is that the full SCSS theming API definition itself is proprietary and not open sourced/publicly documented, as per this prime post here. This means that the only official way to create a new SCSS based theme is with the designer, which is paid for.
This is a real frustration as due to the version matrix, if you stick with an older PrimeNG you cannot upgrade to the latest Angular, e.g. to Angular 8/Ivy.
One way around it is detailed in this helpful blog post here, which involves a certain amount of reverse engineering of the free themes. This is in itself not a big issue as normally in the past I have created themes by modifying an existing themeroller theme (or, for Primefaces, even by rolling one via the ThemeRoller web site tool).
However as the post points out, the fact that the global common SCSS is not now released, we may be subject to breaking changes in the future.
Prime states on the PrimeNG page that the components are all open source, but with parts of the theming architecture now being proprietary and not released, this is does not now appear to be the case any more.
I will continue to monitor this and see what others are doing, but it may be that for my own projects, for the first time ever I will need to move to another component set (e.g. use Material Design when using Angular) and no longer use Prime.
Comments Off on PrimeNG theming no longer open source