Coming soon! New updates & features for Ionic’s Open Source projects

Hey everybody, it’s Matt from the Ionic team! 👋 I know it’s been a while and I am excited to be reaching out and tell you about some of the exciting open source features we’ve been working on behind the scenes.

Me and the leaders of the open source teams will be posting a lot more frequently about what’s to come. Be on the lookout for more posts from Brandy on Ionic Framework, Eric on Capacitor, and Christian on Stencil.

Ionic Framework is building new components and an increased level of customization

Late last year, we released Ionic 8.4, which included a new Select Modal component, swipeable segment content, menu event data, and more.

New features like Datetime range, required properties on inputs, and helper and error text built right into our inputs are coming soon. We’ve also been adding new properties to existing components like “shape” and “size” which should make the customization process easier for everyone.

We hear you on the Framework supporting Material Design 3 and new versions of the React Router, and we are presently working on plans for both of these.

Capacitor is working to create a larger (and better) plugin ecosystem for everyone

You get plugins, you get plugins, everyone gets plugins! The Capacitor and Cordova plugin communities have always been large, and OutSystems (the parent company of Ionic) has a large ecosystem of plugins they maintain as well.

The Capacitor team wanted to make an easy way to bring all of these plugins together, make them better, and make them available to everyone. This will create a much larger set of plugins with more features that are easier to use.

We’ll be announcing a new (optional) style of developing plugins soon that brings new features to everyone. We’ll be using this architecture for all of our plugins, and it will be available to our community as well.

• Core plugin code that exists natively (for use in Capacitor and Cordova apps, OutSystems apps, and even apps built on other native platforms)
• Capacitor, Cordova, and OutSystems wrappers for all plugins.
• New features and APIs in existing plugins.
• New supported plugins that we haven’t had in the past.

We’ll also be continuing to improve and release updates to Capacitor Core. More information about our Capacitor roadmap is coming soon. What I can tell you now is that it includes many modern platform updates, and some special long-term things I’m very excited about.

Stencil is working on new features that provide increased performance

Server-side rendering (SSR) has been one of the biggest topics for Stencil, and we’re working on improving performance to ensure the best end-user experience when utilizing Stencil-based components.

Soon we’ll be releasing an update that drastically reduces the amount of generated code in SSR for initial page size, thus decreasing load time for the end-user. This “magic” that we’ve created is something truly unique to Stencil that we’re excited to share.

Since Stencil is a unique project that we use to build our component library (most Ionic developers don’t use Stencil directly), we’ll also be promoting Stencil to its own GitHub organization to make it easier for our community to work with us and contribute new features.

Increasing our dedication to open source

We’re happy to announce that we’re increasing the size of all open source teams to ensure that we can quickly release improvements and fixes to these important projects. In order to create the best apps possible, we want both OutSystems and Ionic to fuel each other so that both communities prosper.

After all, great mobile apps are great mobile apps, it doesn’t matter whether they are built by low-code developers on OutSystems or high-code developers using Ionic’s OSS. Each community brings fresh new ideas to our teams, allowing us to release improvements on both platforms that benefit everyone. This makes the continued improvements and growth of Ionic’s open source software and communities extremely important to OutSystems.

Our open source projects will continue to grow, improve, and be supported by our wonderful teams!

More to come

This is just a sneak peek, we’ll be doing deep-dive blog posts on everything I’ve talked about for Ionic Framework, Capacitor, and Stencil. We look forward to making improvements to all of our open source, and, as always, are eager to hear your feedback on what we’re working on.

See you soon,

Matt Kremer