rikki.bochow

For a long time I’ve been compiling my Sass into a single CSS file - styles.css, but recently, with our component based design/frontend process and Drupal 8’s lovely Library system I’ve been wondering if the single file was still a good idea. Looking at the amount of unused CSS loading into any given page was a little bit painful.

A recent Drupal 8 project of ours had some great requirements around it’s landing pages, aimed at reusing existing components in a range of layouts and combinations. Paragraphs quickly established itself as the site-building tool of choice and Flexbox always wins for me as the CSS grid/layout approach, so we looked at how the two could be combined to give the client the flexibility they needed, without over-complicating the editor experience.

Base themes in Drupal are incredibly useful but often add bloat to the finished sub-theme when care isn’t taken to remove unnecessary css files, or files that are 5% used and 95% overridden. When porting aGov to Drupal 8 we took the opportunity to improve how it’s theme inheritance is managed, making it easier to create trim, lightweight sub-themes.

Generally speaking hiding content goes alongside a bit of javascript that unhides the content under certain circumstances (think hamburger menu). Sometimes the content improves accessibility but is considered visual noise (says the designer). So as the developer you have a lot of ways to approach this.