Roadmap for 2024 / V7

[ineshbose]

There have been some ideas and plans made for this module for 2024, including release for v7. This issue can also act as feature requests for what you'd like to see in the next update; we'll have to evaluate feasibility and demand, but a lot of it is made possible through the incredible Nuxt community. Being part of the same community, I want to take a minute to acknowledge Atinux for allowing me to maintain the module as I work closely and learn more about Nuxt everyday; along with kazupon for recognising my time spent triaging issues for the powerful i18n module, so thank you.

Review of 2023

• We are still on v6.x.x, and this module is a great example of supporting for both Nuxt 2 and Nuxt 3.
• We made a lot of improvements to the module, such as referencing config in app, adaptive content paths, and performance improvements.
• We cleaned up a lot of old issues on the repository and are staying on top of triaging issues; I'm glad that we have stayed under 10 issues throughout the year, and hope it stays that way.
• Tailwind v3.3 and later in the year v3.4 released.
• Tailwind Connect 2023 happened, and we got a look at Oxide, based on Lightning CSS.

Plans for 2024

• We are doing some code cleanup along with config changes that I hope also provides a lot of clarity along with extensibility for features we provide; refer feat: more customisable configuration #743 and feat: editorSupport option #784; since the deprecated options have straight-forward alternative, we'll likely drop them in the last minor version of v6.x.
• Vue 2 has reached EOL, and Nuxt 2 support ends June 30th 2024; for the next major version (v7), we will drop support for Nuxt 2. This will help with the maintainability of the module, and make improvements faster. Be sure to read https://v2.nuxt.com/lts/.
• I recognise some issues with the config viewer, and I'm looking into options for this. Personally, I'd like to see this issue Ship esm version rogden/tailwind-config-viewer#49 getting resolved and the viewer app to be updated to Vue 3 (or even Nuxt 3 SSG would be cooler 😎) with composition API for Vapor Mode.
• The main focus, and the reason this issue has been created, is bringing first-class HMR support (see HMR for config imports and latency improvement #682). The reason this is posing to be challenging is because this module provides a lot of integration to Nuxt features, such as hooks, layers, templates, etc; so working on this may involve breaking changes that we are looking to avoid. A potential way to avoid breaking behaviour is by usage of Proxies in our hooks and tracking state changes and merging them with defu in the templates this module creates (we shall also provide the ability to use presets merging strategy), and link the Tailwind PostCSS plugin to that template which will then track configs for us. We will have to consider how to update the expose config templates, and potential changes to Tailwind PostCSS plugin with Oxide. If we are able to deliver this without breaking changes, we will release this as part of v6.x.x (to support Nuxt 2) as well; this is the aim.

At the end of the day, this module is simple; it just integrates two incredible frameworks (Tailwind CSS and Nuxt) together, and it doesn't require a lot of attention, so we're looking to reach a point of having no bugs and being feature complete so we can work on providing more modules and improvements for Nuxt.

Be sure to continue conversations on issues; we aim to discuss with transparency, and keep an eye on the roadmap on Volta.