Deprecate pat-select2 and replace it with a more up-to-date library

[petschki]

PLIP (Plone Improvement Proposal)

Responsible Persons

Proposer: @petschki

Seconder:

Abstract

Rather than updateing pat-select2 I propose to replace it, since the last release is 4.1.0-rc.0 and 4 (!) years old. Found these (up to date) so far:

• Tom Select https://tom-select.js.org/
• Choices.js https://choices-js.github.io/Choices/
• selectize.js (https://github.com/selectize/selectize.js/releases/tag/v0.15.2)

Note that the last release of selectize.js is also 3 years old ...

Motivation

Since we're using a ancient and patched version of select2==3.5.4 I started to migrate it to the latest 4.x but the API changes are hard (gave it a try here plone/mockup#1295) especially for the multiselect changes ... so a pattern rewrite from scratch is mandatory.

Since the latest version is already 4 years old and a release candidate, I started to look for a replacement in general. I think its better to but effort in a new library than keeping select2 alive.

Proposal & Implementation

The new library will be implemented as new pattern, so the move from select2 should be simple. It's similar to our new pat-contentbrowser while the old pat-relateditems still exists ...

The options and API of the new pattern should be compatible to pat-select2 in order to make it simple for integrators to move away.

Deliverables

New pattern and z3c.form widget implementation (in plone.app.z3cform)

Risks

pat-select2 is used in other mockup patterns so there is some work to do to get rid of all bits of it:

• pat-querystring: update new implementation.
• pat-relateditems: already "marked" as deprecated, so no work to do here

Participants

1letter

/cc @plone/classicui-team

[MrTango]

What features do we need?