Compile your theme

Big sites need big themes. Each additional functionality adds more pages and elements. There comes a moment when theme becomes too fat, handling increasingly bigger theme comes to a limit:

  • lack of good structure
  • loss of overview
  • hard to manage
  • continuous resizing graphical design elements for different responsive layouts
  • constant repetition certain design values like default color of the site
  • heavy CSS makes browsers slow

Fortunately there are some good tools that add new dimension to theming. During the lecture we take a look to following solutions:

  • using predefined values, expressions and conditions in CSS
  • the way to split and join CSS on the fly
  • automatic compilation, combination and derivation of CSS
  • structuring CSS
  • automatic generation and conversion of images for different layout sizes
  • speeding up CSS handling by browser

This lecture is intended for folks who are fluent in CSS, any additional programming skill helps. All techniques and solutions presented can be used for themes with any size but this stuff is almost unavoidable with big themes. Theme building can be automated a lot to avoid too much manual work and occasional errors.

In a practical sense I will introduce following tools and concepts: SASS, ImageMagick, Make(file), CSS selector matching and specificity.

Slides

http://www.slideshare.net/ragnarkurm/compile-your-style-25500334

Track: 
Design and development
Time: 
10:50

Ragnar Kurm