Boiler - let's call it 0.2 - Ready for testing!

A lot more work has gone into this version - I will highlight the major stuff here, and you can find the others as you play.

The first is that a new skin 'flow' has been added. This is a responsive skin! open up theme_settings.html and set it as the active skin to check it out.

After a lot of consideration - I have selected a 'skin first' approach instead of 'mobile first'. Typically the buzz is more for mobile first - but this is a lot of work for the end user, and in my travels - you don't typically see people restyling the whole site because of device - instead they typically tweek the design to make it work on these smaller/larger devices. So boom - "skin first responsive design" is born. Screw the preachy fanboys - it is more important to offer a simple system to our users imo. Let me know if you dig or hate.

Quite a bit of markup skeleton tweeks.

Introduced a new js api of sorts for all your javascript that stores common lookups for you. when you use a javascript selector like $('body') this performs a dom lookup, which chews up resources.

So I have added an array of common lookups for you to use in your scripts.

Here is the array:


Here is an example of how to use it:


hmm, what else...

I have begun playing with a concatenator - this php file (boiler.php) is in the extras folder - place it in your icms root path and enable the option in theme_settings or skin_settings. Used little at this time, but it will get better over time. You could find this very useful if for example you used the extra meta file to include your own scripts. concatenate them to reduce http requests people.

One consideration I am thinking about is putting all the media queries into a single css file instead of making so many requests - this might be a little more user friendly - far less files to deal with...


There is a bunch more boring stuff, lots of gems to find for you early explorers - still no docs yet - so be brave adventurers :)

Protector won't let me upload it here, so here is a link

Thank you again, let me testing from Monday. It's is a very great html5 framework, I like it really.

I'll have to check this out asap! I'm quite impressed by this list of added features.

Thanks!

Quote:

Going back to the renderMetas() exercise - would this be the place to add a css and js concatenator and minifier? Would we want to do that on the fly for every page load, or cache results based on some parameter?

I would think we would cache results based on the template creation timestamp. There is no reason to build on every page if we don't have to. The purpose of the concatenator I wrote up is to put the weight of fetching the files on the server and not on the client.

If we cached it with a random filename - or even a logical filename based on its build time and what zone it is in, then we just cachebust it with the last cache clear timestamp value. If i recall correctly don't we store that info somewhere already?

cachebust:

You really did a great job on this theme. Thanks for this. I'm glad to see you more active again..

I'm very impressed. A very great work! Right now, I could not find any issues.

I am glad everyone enjoys it so far. I have some more changes coming down the pipe that adress some little bugs I have uncovered - as well as some excellent work done by Matt(sublime) integrating less into boiler.

Yeah, I heard about it over Twitter from him. I can not wait ...

I read it on twitter as well. This is turning out to be a huge modernisation of the themeing capabilities of ImpressCMS. Thanks for the initiative, and I'm following this with much interest.

I have one suggestion for the "flow" skin. The flow is a semantic and responsive skin. The issue is the left block. The left block should be going down, so that the (middle) content is present on top always. Otherwise the user has to scroll a lot.

What do you think about it?

I guess that really depends on the site in question, if you have a large left column - then I could see this being a concern.

While I wrote boiler to not require changing the html markup - for some sites that may be a necessity.

If I had a left column that wasn't always necessary - I would probably do what I did to the menu and make it collapsed by default.

What I may do is allow you to set the order of blocks, and then they will by default collapses ltr

[L] [C] [R]
[C] [L] [R]
[L] [R] [C]

kinda stuff.

I have some more updated coming for Boiler. This next version will be release as a 1.0, so hold tight on using it in production until then.

I am running a little behind because my daughter was very ill last week, so when I get caught up I will try and get these changes merged and and push them out to you guys.

Thank you again, I can not will wait

Very exciting to see this advance.
I hope your daughter is better now. This time of year is risky for getting sick.

I wish your daughter is better just now.