Getting started

1. Ensure NodeJS is installed and npm is available on your PATH
2. If it isn't already, install the gulp cli globally npm i gulp-cli -g
3. Run npm install to install the project dependencies
4. Run gulp to launch the project in dev mode

JavaScript

1. semistandard as a way to conform to the same coding styles. This is enforced during compilation.
2. webpack for commonjs (node style) front-end javascript dependency management
3. blue-js for a simple dom library alternative to jquery (optional)
4. blue-widgets for creating class based 'widgets' that attach functionality to the dom (optional)

CSS

1. ITCSS as a scalable CSS architecture
2. Sass (Scss syntax) for CSS preprocessing
3. BEM for selector naming
4. Autoprefixer - a post-processing build task to avoid having to write vendor prefixes
5. Scss files are automatically linted with our style rules in the .scss-lint.yml config

HTML

1. Nunjucks for simple layouts and partials to avoid repetitive code
2. Nunjucks pages and partials are automatically linted with our style rules in the .htmlhintrc config to catch some common errors

Writing Documentation

All the docs for your project live in ./docs - everything is in markdown and is rendered to the end user using DocsHub, please have a read of those docs in order to understand how it works.

Gulp tasks

gulp

The default task runs the build in dev mode. Assets are copied or compiled to the ./www folder and a browsersync+nunjucks dev server is launched which compiles the nunjucks templates on the fly and live reloads the pages when pages or assets change (far quicker than recompiling all templates every time)

gulp release

Run a build in release mode. Instead of compiling all output to ./www the assets are all compiled and minified to ./dist. The nunjucks pages are compiled into html.

gulp stage

Same as the default dev build task, but minifies/uglifies CSS and JS and is therefore much slower. Useful for speed testing in dev mode.

gulp favicons

Regenerate favicons (and nunjucks partial) from ./src/favicon.png

Upgrading

See release history for changelogs in order to manually upgrade to a new version