FriendsOfCake/BootstrapUI migration from CakePHP 3 to CakePHP 4 with Bootstrap 3

Question

We are upgrading our CakePHP 3 project to CakePHP 4 because we need to support PHP 8.1.

We are also using https://github.com/FriendsOfCake/bootstrap-ui plugin's HTML/Flash/FormHelpers to generate Bootstrap 3 styled HTML. We do not need the bake functionalities of the library, only the helpers.

The newer versions that are for CakePHP 4 core are using either Bootstrap 4 or 5. So do you guys have any ideas on how to migrate our project so we don't need to upgrade from Bootstrap 3?

I tried finding information about this but there is not really that much. Upgrading from Bootstrap 3 to 4 would cause rewriting huge amount of our HTML also.

Answer 1

You could try to configure the helper's template's to make the output Bootstrap 3 compatible, and possibly extend the plugin helpers to add/change functionality where necessary and possible.

If that doesn't suffice, then another option could be to use your own fork of friendsofcake/bootstrap-ui, either from the 1.x branch which you could try to make compatible with CakePHP 4, or from the 3.x branch which you can try to make compatible with Bootstrap 3.

I can't really tell you which one would be easier, you should probably expect having to invest quite some time into it either way.