I really like this idea; it would help some longstanding performance issues on the OPAC (and perhaps, eventually, the staff side). Even better, it would make regeneration of the CSS from the LESS a bit more straightforward, and allow us to remove the generated files from Git. Eventually, it could also give a cleaner solution for some of the caching issues we've hacked around. It seems like the easiest way forward would be to minify/concatenate all of the JS and CSS that is shown on every page (so we could just throw a link to the output in doc-head-close). Thoughts? 2016-02-07 18:53 GMT-07:00 Owen Leonard <oleonard@myacpl.org>:
I would very much like to start using some kind of build tool for front-end assets in Koha. The ones I've encountered are Grunt and Gulp:
Grunt: http://gruntjs.com/ Gulp: http://gulpjs.com/
I have some experience with Grunt, and have heard good things about Gulp. Has anyone else used either in their non-Koha projects?
Adopting them would introduce a little more complexity to the process of making client-side changes to Koha, and to be honest I'm not sure of the right way to incorporate the tools into our workflow.
What I see as the advantages:
- Automatic linting, minification, and concatenation of CSS and JS - Potentially, automatic compression of images and contruction of image sprites - Overall performance improvements from the above
Disadvantages: A new process to learn for those wanting to contribute front-end modifications. A new set of dependencies for front-end developers (Node.js etc).
If there is interest I'd be happy to submit a patch introducing the process to the OPAC as a demonstration.
-- Owen
-- Web Developer Athens County Public Libraries http://www.myacpl.org _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel website : http://www.koha-community.org/ git : http://git.koha-community.org/ bugs : http://bugs.koha-community.org/
-- Jesse Weaver