Upcoming changes to Makerkit in Summer 2023

An overview of the changes coming to MakerKit in Summer 2023.

As our tech stacks progress and new technologies emerge, we need to make sure that MakerKit is up to date with the latest and greatest. This means that we need to make some changes to the platform. We will be making these changes in Summer 2023.

From packages being updated to frameworks evolving, technology never sleeps - and neither do we.

Design Updates

We will be updating the design of MakerKit to be more modern and sleek. To do so, we will fully embrace Shadcn UI - so that you can copy/paste components from the documentation into your MakerKit projects.

Tailwind CSS

We will also update our colors convention in Tailwind CSS.

We will retire the black convention in favour of dark, which we will use for dark mode. This will allow us to have a more consistent naming convention. This also means we can better integrate with Shadcn UI.

This will also allow to build more themes for dark mode, which we will be doing in the future.

Package Updates

Some of the packages into the kits will be replaced for better alternatives.

  1. Headless UI will be fully removed in favour of Shadcn UI / Radix UI.
  2. Additionally we will remove the classnames package in favour of the clsx package, which is smaller, faster and maintained.

I am still looking for a better alternative to using animations, since the Transition component from Headless UI was very useful, but has been broken for a while with no fix in sight. Pity.

Framework Updates

Next.js App Router

While the Supabase kits use the new Next.js App Router, the Firebase kit is still using the Pages router. My intention is to update the kit in a whole new kit.

With that said - I am still fighting with way too many bugs in the App Router - so I will wait until Next.js 14 is released to update the Firebase kit.

The road to Remix 2

As Remix is venturing into version 2 - we will be updating MakerKit to use Remix 2. While we have already migrated some settings to Remix 2, we will be fully migrating to Remix 2 by enabling all the flags and settings.

The most striking difference is its file-system routing changing - which means that we will need to update the way that we handle routing in MakerKit and our folders structure. As you can imagine, this is a big change and not easily merged using Git.

Since the updates may be too hard to merge, I will be creating guides for updating to Remix 2.

Conclusion

These updates will start to roll out in the next few days. I will be updating the kits one by one, starting with the Firebase kits.

I am excited to bring these changes to MakerKit. I hope that you are too.

If you have any questions, please reach out to us on Twitter or on Discord.