Style Guides

A short video showing how to use the newly released Component Blocks module.

In most of the projects we build, the HTML markup provided by core just gets in the way. There is way too many wrapper divs. This can cause issues when trying to create lean markup that matches what is produced in a generated styleguide.

In this post, I'll introduce you to the concept of bare templates, and how you can remove unnecessary markup from your Twig templates.

At PNX, style guide driven development is our bag. It’s what we love: building a living document that provides awesome reference for all our front end components. And Drupal 8, with its use of Twig, complements this methodology perfectly. The ability to create a single component, and then embed that component and its markup throughout a Drupal site in a variety of different ways without having to use any tricks or hacks is a thing of beauty.

The traditional approach of directly styling default Drupal markup is not a scalable solution when we consider the volatility of the modern browser ecosystem. It is now necessary for front-end developers to abstract design patterns into manageable components. By using a styleguide we can automate the process of isolating and cataloguing patterns so they can be iterated and tested against independently. In this post I discuss ideas and put forward some informal rules around managing these components from within a styleguide.

During PreviousNext’s weekly developers meeting I recently gave a lightning talk about how to use kss-node to auto-generate a website style guide. If you’ve even tangentially followed front-end development, you’ll find that this is yet-another blog post describing “project A implementing technology B with hip, new language/framework C.”

But kss-node is really cool and useful, especially if you understand how it fits into the larger picture of the new web development process. Fortunately, my previous post provides that big picture, so if you’d like to understand how Agile is turning web development inside-out and how style-guide-driven development is the new website development workflow, please go read that first. Then head back here for the screencast to get you started with kss-node.

If you’ve looked at front-end development at any time during the past four years, you know that there has been an explosion of new technologies. We are inundated with new projects like bower and cucumber and behat and KSS. It is a lot to take in. At the past two Drupalcons there have been sessions about this overload, My Brain is Full: The state of Front-end developement. Essentially those sessions are asking “What the hell is going on?”

“Everyone is describing the one little piece they’ve created, but don’t explain (or even reference!) the larger concepts of how all of these elements link together.”

— Frank Chimero, July 2014 Designer News AMA

This is my attempt to explain.