Skeleton Progress Update - January 2026

[endigo9740]

Hey everyone, Chris here from the Skeleton team. Today's monthly update is a bit more exciting as we transition to the new year. This year has seen many large updates, including both the Skeleton v3 launch, the Skeleton v4 launch, and of course our major documentation overhaul. And we have some very exciting plans for Skeleton over the next year. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let's review what was introduce during this past month.

Carousel Component

Today we're excited to usher in a new year with a new component - the carousel. As usual, this is Zag-based component with a deep feature set and great accessibly story. Note that portions of the component are provided "headless" to provide more control over styling from the ground up, but we've covered the basics. Like all newly launched Skeleton components, this will be flagged as a beta feature for now, meaning it's not yet intended for production use. Especially as we have one pending bug ticket filed with Zag for RTL support. But please try it out and let us know what you think!

NOTE: Removal of the Stepper Cookbook Guide

Given the wide feature set and accessibility benefits of this new component, we've opted to retired our cookbook carousel guide. If for some reason you still wish to have access to the old source, find it in the pull request below.

View the PR: #4191

Native Base Styling

Earlier this month, long time contributor and maintainer @Hugos68 has implemented a notable change behind the scenes to convert all Skeleton component styles from a Tailwind utility class format, to more native(ish) CSS styling. Refer to our updated contribution guidelines to learn more about how this works. Note this will have no impact on how you utilize the components - it is completely seamless with no breaking changes.

View the PR: #4182

Build Process Improvements

While the above change to styling is not immediately impactful to end users, it was part of a larger effort by @Hugos68 to streamline our internal build process. The result is we've eliminated all the clunky build steps that slowed our development workflow on a technical level. Working in the local dev environment you would see a large number of processes per each save, and in some cases it would be enough to choke the dev server, requiring a restart. Now changes are nearly instant, providing a top tier DX experience for maintaining the project. This should make us much more productive, especially for large updates in the future. So great job Hugo!

View the PR: #4188

Looking forward to 2026

And with that we wrap for the year. I'm still excited to share our early drafts of the Skeleton v5 plans in the near future. Unfortunately I'm juggling a number of real life items at present. Once I have more time available, I hope to pull back the curtain and show you what we're cooking. For now, have a happy new year and as always thank you for all your support!