Server side CSS and JS manager

[thenexus00 (Liam Dilley)]

I totally understand regarding local compiled CSS and JS solutions today and looking to implement. In various projects this occurs but I also hate how we are with so many pre-compile solutions now. It is not good.

With the removal of Smidge and with how my company works with junior developers, front end and back end developers as well as our agile development approach I need something to replace it.
I tried a few 3rd party and they either were to clunky or did not work with Umbraco.

So I made something myself which is very light weight. You can have your master template use them and if you build out a block grid for your site structure and want to have true modular seperate block components for various content you can add the additional styles for each as seperate CSS. Development will output each one for debugging and on a production compile them.

Always hate critical feedback but need it. Anyone willing to privately have a look and see what you think?

[sebastiaan (Sebastiaan Janssen ⚓)]

Smidge is independent of Umbraco and works on any ASP.NET project, so I would think you could just keep using it. You’ll probably need to do some configuration first that Umbraco would’ve taken care of before.

GitHub - Shazwazza/Smidge: A lightweight runtime CSS/JavaScript file...

To be honest though, I think in this day and age, I think it would be good for your juniors to learn a bit of NPM and Node, these are very common and necessary tools to work on the web these days.

[liamgold (Liam Goldfinch)]

I agree with @sebastiaan — I think the natural progression would be to move towards front-end bundling.

Personally, I would recommend using Vite. It allows you to bundle and minify your JavaScript and CSS easily, but at build time rather than at runtime.

You can still reference the generated bundles in your Razor views wherever it makes the most sense to include them.

This will also help you with:

Should Umbraco default to precompiled Razor views with Hot Reload?

I actually hate the precompile view because it would break a number of 3rd party stuff which use views for a start. Secondly I hate it in Kentico because the the processes and steps are just that much more for even small changes and updates. It is a thing that with streamlining companies especially for me is just the amount of time waisting compiling, managing and deploying even small changes these days is simply to costly. We need to quickly and easily make view changes and deploy them and b…

[LuukPeters (Luuk Peters (Proud Nerds))]

I also think it’s really nice to use ‘frontend’ compilers. This saves possible runtime issues and most bundlers can optimize the final bundle by leaving out stuff that isn’t used.