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Drupal devel generate content template1/11/2024 ![]() ![]() Otherwise, your style guide will quickly be no better than the PDF style guide you might have worked from in the past that became outdated the second it was handed off to you. What this really comes down to is that your style guide needs to be generated automatically. A Living Style Guide is Always Kept Up-to-Date We’ll look at some approaches in the second part of this series. That adjustment or any future ones need to make it back into the style guide. Obviously, it is possible to maintain all of this, but it requires quite a bit of discipline and attention to detail.Īs a result, there has been quite a bit of experimentation in the Drupal community to find ways to get Drupal 8 to play nice with popular style guide generators and share the exact same markup. But maybe there were some adjustments that could be made in order to simplify the effort of the implementation. In a perfect world, that goes without a hitch. Consider the workflow where a component is first defined in the style guide and then the markup from the style guide is copied and pasted to be used for implementation. Using real-world markup can be quite a bit harder. Many of the style guide generators often used for this task provide options to import one or more CSS files. If your style guide loads the same CSS that your website does, you’re most likely checking the box. The CSS part of this is usually pretty straightforward. This is especially useful if you’re using a style guide as part of a visual regression testing strategy. The more your style guide reflects reality, the better. Your style guide should use the same CSS and markup as your site. A Living Style Guide Uses Real World CSS and Markup As you might imagine, the more you understand your design system, the more likely it is to be implemented consistently and the better you can later use it to protect you from regressions. This may ring a bell to some as Atomic Design. I’m a fan of Atomic Design, but really any mental model that helps you move away from implementing unique instances of pages and into a system that consists of reusable components is a step in the right direction. If for example, you use a search bar throughout your site, it should look the same and consist of the same markup everywhere it is rendered. Ideally, ones that can be used in combination to create larger, more complicated components. ![]() Rather than taking a page-based approach to design, your living style guide should consist of a number of smaller, reusable components. A Living Style Guide is Modular and Re-usable The living style guide will be the cornerstone of your design system and I believe that there are four key elements that can make a living style guide especially useful. Of course, it requires the thoughtful development of a design system to achieve this. The Starbucks style guide and the US Web Design Standards both serve as excellent examples of what a living style guide could look like.įor example, if the look and feel of a component have been defined in advance, a backend developer should be able to ensure that during implementation the output includes the intended markup and classes, and in theory, the component should just magically look as expected. It might be used internally by your team, shared with a client, or made available publicly for all to see. It can include elements that have not yet been implemented and ones that are already live. ![]() A living style guide is a live reference of the visual language of your site or application, including all of the guidelines, elements, components, and templates on your site. No more swooping in for a theming phase late in the project.Ī key component that makes this approach possible is the living style guide. With this approach, look and feel can be developed at any time. It allows the look and feel of the components on the site to be developed before the functionality actually exists. Part 1: Developing Your Design SystemĪt a high level, style guide driven development is an approach that decouples front and back end development. Let’s discuss the groundwork that this entire workflow depends on - a design system. As I spend more time working with Drupal 8, I’ve taken the opportunity to redefine my theming workflow to incorporate style guide driven development techniques that I had used in fits and starts on Drupal 7 projects. I fully expect this process to continue to evolve over time, but the current approach has served nicely for Drupal 8 projects thus far, and also appears to be well suited to accommodate some of the component-based rendering approaches that look to be part of Drupal’s theming future. ![]()
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