Server side CSS and JS manager

Questions
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1

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?

3

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.

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.

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4

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:

2 Likes
5

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.

6

I tried as I mentioned. I kept getting heaps of conflicts with Umbraco.

7

I mentioned using it and why for many that is not an appropriate approach.

8

I think you’ll struggle to get helpful feedback on the approach, as I think everyone that’s played this game seriously will reject the premise.

This is the killer. How do you know that it compiles successfully before deploying?

This is the reason I, and many others, soured on solutions like Client Dependency Framework and Smidge. We’d push perfectly valid CSS and JS to production and wind up breaking the site because a dependency of a dependency hadn’t been updated to support a certain CSS selector or a JavaScript feature - and I’m not necessarily talking cutting-edge things, I’m talking years-old well-supported features.

If we’re talking about compiling code, a process that may fail (and is idempotent, given the source CSS/JS), the best place for that failure to be picked up is at build-time - the same as we do for C#.

I hear you. It’s been a journey, but the industry/community is strongly voting for Vite, and you’ll find lots of help using it and integrating it with Umbraco..

2 Likes
9

I have to say if you have issues with compiled CSS through Smidge that there are serious issues with the CSS, sorry :confused:
I nor anyone else I know has had ANY issues in this regard.

10

Regarding pre-compile solutions.
We have taken on another client with bad developers.
How many elements with DIFFERENT post production compilers?
11!!!
How can anyone think this is OK?