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
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--
Jesse Weaver