Vue Material Current Status

[marcosmoura]

This is not an issue, but the current status of the library.

TL;DR; - Vue Material grew faster than I'd expected, as I started this project to solve my own needs for a simple, fast and reliable solution for Material Design for Vue. With time, it became a crooked (yet usable) solution without support for vital features from Vue's core and Community. But the project isn't dead at all. We will release a brand new Vue Material really soon, written from scratch, tested accordingly, looking for performance and with SSR/Nuxt and Code Splitting support.

First of all I want to THANK YOU all of you who used Vue Material. It is being a major pleasure to see that this project have more than 3.7k stars here in GitHub. See this project being mentioned by Vue's core members at Vue Conf, being used in Chrome Extensions, company products and websites is more rewarding that any hobby! Equally good for me than a cold beer in a hot summer!
I also want to special thanks @Morgul, @pablohpsilva, @d3radicated, @Samuell1 and many others that I probably forgot to mention here, but that helped me in some way! You guys rocked! Thank you so freaking much!
I received great messages on Gitter, Slack Channel and Email about this project. Those things made me keep going, and of course, be a better developer.

A little history of Vue Material

I was working on a company that could only use Google's technologies, and as a Front End Engineer I had to use Angular or Polymer as a solution back there. And we needed to build everything with Material Design. We chose Angular and Angular Material only because it was more mature than Polymer, at the time. Although I didn't agree it the solutions and felt that it wasn't good things for me, I had to use.
I'm working with Vue, for my side projects, since the 1.0 version and I loved it. Vue Material
started as a small and simple idea that I had in a boring saturday afternoon, as needed to develop a really large freelance project (with MD guidelines) and couldn't find a good solution for Vue. So I started to develop my own library, focusing on the problems that I had on Angular's days and making things easier and practical to use. I made this as a side project and decided to included it in the Awesome Vue repo. And it became the library as it is today.

Why there is a pile of unsolved issues and opened PR's without answer.

This is my first attempt to create an Open Source project and as I wouldn't expected this wide acceptance by the community, I wasn't prepared to deal if that. English is not my first language and more than 70 issues was created per week when the project started to gain traction, so I did my best at the time to keep the things pretty clean and solved. I had a simple Front End job in a company who only developed solutions for other companies and I had time to deal with those issues and PR's by my own. But I switched to another company, along with the very first vacations that I had in my life. And the things started to be very hard to manage, as my new job required more of my time when I started. And that's why the project started to become crooked and hard to reason about, with almost no response for days. No SSR Support, tons of bugs, a lot of performance glitches, cross browser issues, scenarios that I wouldn't imagine that this library could fit...
I tried to bring contributors, but it wasn't clear enough what the project would become, what we had to tackle, the next steps, which was the project needs and everything.
@pablohpsilva started to be a core maintainer and @Morgul a member, both developing and answering issues for free and because they liked the project. But even with they help, it is hard to manage the old codebase. Because, like I said, it is crooked and not well written/tested. Thinking of all of those problems, I decided to rewrite everything from the ground up, to suit those needs.

What is being rewritten?

The core, the build script, the theme factory, all components... EVERYTHING!
All of them with unit tests, in a active CI environment checking everything, with automated deploy and changelog versions, more reliable documentation website, live examples on JSFiddle, support for SSR/Nuxt, Code Splitting, all Vue 2.4 features, seamingless integration with Vue Router in all components that depends on it, improved performance, a reworked grid system, themes with support for your brand colors and darker themes, more accurate with the Guidelines and many other small things that definitely will make the library better. All components are being recreated to suit those needs and new ones will be easy to be developed. It will have a great new advanced guide on how to extend Vue Material for your own needs. Yes! It will have support for what I call as "Vue Material third party integration". You will see that is really easy to extend and change the current components for your project.
I'm doing this because I still believe in the future of this project and its potential. :)

Where the new Vue Material is being developed?

I created a new repository, as the projected do not share any code with the actual repo. It's here: https://github.com/vuematerial/vue-material-experiments
I will soon add a table with the current progress.

Man! I need the Datepicker...

Yes. I know. Sorry about that!
It will be available in this new release along with all of the existent components reworked. I PROMISE!

Man! I need the ___________

Have something in mind? Need a new components? Created something meaningful and think that this can fit inside the lib? Let's discuss? We have a new Slack Channel and I'm online there almost everyday. Send me a message!

What's next?

There will be some new tools to make the Vue Material ecosystem better. I will create boilerplates and templates to make easy to getting started. Also all documentation examples will be available on JSFiddle.

I want to help. What do you need?

Well. All kind of help are welcome. If you want to contribute with the project, just send me a message and I will tell what you can do. We recently created a Slack Channel to share ideas and to keep all the comunication in one place.

I want to pay you a coffee!

Wow! I don't know the others mantainers, but I don't drink coffee. But I can easily turn this into a strong and bold IPA beer or a burger! If you think that this project helped you in some way, and you have extra pennies to give, just access this Patreon page. I will soon create a backers page inside the project website.

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Thank you guys. Sorry for not being so responsive on the last two or three months.

❤