[RFC] Deprecate the bundle?

[mbabker]

OK, this might seem a little extreme, but...

This bundle provides an integration for CKEditor 4.x to Symfony applications. It went end of life as of June 2023, aside from extended commercial security support. Because these commercial support releases are being tagged on GitHub and released through NPM the same way as the open-source package had previously, issues like #253 are not going to go away.

The upgrade to CKEditor 5 is not a straightforward upgrade as far as the editor itself goes, and my feeling is the amount of change needed to support it wouldn't be feasible in an existing package like this one.

Perhaps it may be time to deprecate this bundle given that the main thing it supports is no longer supported and the effort to keep supporting it would be a huge undertaking.

[Seb33300]

Can crowdfunding to finance the development of CKEditor 5 support be considered?

[wwalc]

👋 Wiktor from CKSource here (the CKEditor team). Typically what worked well for us was having a clear separation between CKEditor 4 and CKEditor 5 in public projects. Therefore a separate project that brings CKEditor 5 seems like the best approach. CKEditor 5 has nothing in common with CKEditor 4 when it comes to technicalities. And we do not plan to ship CKEditor 6 anytime soon :-)

If you decide to create another project for CKEditor 5 and get stuck & need any help on the JavaScript side (warning: PHP is not our strongest skill ;)), please feel free to reach out to us directly (https://ckeditor.com/contact/) and mention this issue.

When it comes to deprecating this particular bundle, one thing to consider, there might be projects that use FOSCKEditorBundle with an LTS version, what options they would have?

Last but not least, thank you for maintaining the FOSCKEditorBundle for many years.

[mbabker]

When it comes to deprecating this particular bundle, one thing to consider, there might be projects that use FOSCKEditorBundle with an LTS version, what options they would have?

At worst, its users (and I am one of them, so this does impact my workload) get "this package is abandoned" messages in their Composer (PHP's dependency management tool) output whenever the package is marked as abandoned/deprecated in Packagist (the package repository Composer uses). Nothing would catastrophically break at that time.

Given that this bundle is already a low-maintenance project and supports Symfony 6 (whose LTS branch will stop receiving bug fixes in November 2026 with security support to November 2027), if it were EOL'd today, things would be OK for a while. Short of a PHP release over the next couple of years fatally breaking this bundle, I don't foresee anything that would block CKEditor 4 LTS users from using this bundle through the CKEditor LTS timeframe. Plus, the deprecation would only affect folks using this bundle to render the editor server-side (either in Twig templates or through the Form component integration), folks using Symfony primarily for an API backend and something like Vue for a frontend would probably not be using this bundle.