What is the future/roadmap for communities built with with the Visualforce+Tabs template? Or sites which use Visualforce pages? With the deadlines rapidly approaching when orgs are migrated to Lightning for how long will the old classic UI in the Visualforce+Tabs template be supported?
Hi Richard. The most important thing to know here is that Lightning Experience is not the same as Lightning Community. There are no dependencies between the two. You can move your internal org to Lightning Experience and still use the legacy Tab + Visualforce container for your community. There are no current plans to stop supporting that.
That said, all of the product work over the last 6 years or so has gone into Lightning Community. So while you CAN stay on VF+Tabs, it means you're missing out on key capabilities that we've shipped over the years. Standing up a Lightning Community is ridiculously easy, so it's probably worth an evaluation of what it would take to move your custom items over. There's a Visualforce lightning component that may help minimize any code refactors you have to do.
The other factor to consider is that Lightning Communities can have some of their pages made public. This replaces the old
Force.com Sites capability with a unified web property (a community) that supports both unauthenticated and authenticated usage.
