Currently, each channel ( Portal, Editors, Players, Keycloak, Static site, Help center, etc ) has its own CSS codebase and therefore following challenges occur -
To keep design consistency across all the channels, the team has to do changes in all codebases.
The CSS code will be maintained in the Design system repo only. It will follow the Sunbird's branching strategy. i.e. Each release will have its own branch. At the end of each release, the version tag will be created to do the code freeze.
NPM
This design system repo branches will be used as the package.json dependency in all the channels. Eg -
For each release, this branch reference ( #2.2.0 in the above example ) will be updated in the package.json with the relevant version branch.
To pull the latest changes, one will have to delete node_modules folder and do the npm install again.
For the Developers who are contributing to the Design system - they can use npm link( https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/link ) to make a symlink to see the real-time changes.
Why GitHub branch as a dependency over NPM package publishing?
NPM packages cannot be updated without version changing. Every time the change is made, a version (minor, medium, major ) jump will be there so 2 challenges -
It will not be possible to keep the NPM package version number same as Sunbird release version.
Every time the package-lock.json needs to be updated.
Each version will have its own folder in the name of version no. itself. Eg - <url>/2.2.0/styles.min.css or <url>/2.4.0/styles.min.css
For each git commit, the CI build will be triggered from respective version branch and therefore respective dev CDN version will be updated. Upon approval, these version builds will be promoted to the staging, pre-prod and prod CDN servers.
These versioned CDN URLs can be directly used in any projects by simply adding in the HTML. Eg -
What all I will get from these NPM dependencies and CDN's?
There might be some cases where entire CSS might be not be required. It may require a few components or layouts or fonts only. So here is the folder structure CDN and NPM Dependency will have -
base.css # Only contains the reusable utility classes. like margins, paddings, display etc.
common.css # Common = base.css + layout.css
components/
|- accordian.css # Only contains accordian code
|- banner.css
|- breadcrumb.css
|- cards.css
|- pagesections.scss
|- ...
components.css # Concated code of all components folder css files
fonts/
|- notosans.css # Base64 encoded font files
|- notonastaliq.css
|- notobengali.css
|- ...
fonts.css # Concated code of all fonts folder css files
layout.css
pages/
|- helpcenter.css
|- ...
pages.css # Concated code of all fonts folder css files
semantic-merged.css # semantic-merged.css = semantic.min.css + Customization Override code + RTL overrides of Semantic
styles.css # The main file, which has all the code.
variables.css # Only contains the CSS variables used in the project.
vendors/
|- slick.css
|- izitoast.css
|- ...
vendors.css # Concated code of all vendor folder css files
Usage
CDN
If you would like to use the entire design system you can use by adding the following code in the head of the HTML. Eg-