[LRUG] Best practices for reskinning / redesigning the look and UI of a Rails app?

Fri Mar 18 12:18:01 PDT 2016

We've had some success using variants in Rails 4 to reskin an app using
material css.

We created a new layout called "material" for the new variant, which loads
CSS from a different assets sub-directory, then we could create
index.html+material and it would be rendered with the new skin. The nice
thing is that the old views render without any extra effort, if there isn't
a new version available. So it makes it quite easy to do a gradual
re-skinning.

http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/4_1_release_notes.html#action-pack-variants

David

On 18 March 2016 at 17:11, Priit Tark <priit at gitlab.eu> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have done new redesign implementation for heavy use live site where it
> wasn't possible to upgrade everything at once because some parts needed
> ground up rethink and more time than some other parts.
>
> In some period of time we used even dynamic layout switch depending on
> context/user.
>
> For development clarity, we gave distinct name for a new layout such as
> 'ui2'. This way you can prefix some already upgraded partials with 'ui2_'
> without messing up old user interface components and partials.
>
> It work for us well upgrading step-by-step with group of controller
> without any big mess.
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> Priit Tark
> Lead Developer
>
> Gitlab Ltd
> http://gitlab.eu
> Ticketing
> http://tikitur.com
>
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 18, 2016 at 5:34 PM, Jesse Waites <jesse.waites at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Thanks Jon, that sounds like a great approach.
>>
>> I was also thinking about firing up a new rails app, literally "rails new
>> prototype", and building the views I want onto a clean slate, then
>> transferring everything over to the new rails app once the HTML is in
>> place, rather than writing new HTML on top of old HTML and having a
>> spaghetti type situation on my hands, with new and old HTML everywhere and
>> CSS classes conflicting with each other all over the place. Anyone have
>> thoughts on that approach?
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 18, 2016 at 11:15 AM, Jon Wood <jon at ninjagiraffes.co.uk>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> We've been through that process a could of times at Hubbub now. For our
>>> latest revision we rebuilt the entire customer facing website from the
>>> ground up as an API client - it was the right move, as it killed off a lot
>>> of technical debt that had grown over the years, and allowed us to
>>> completely rethink how customers approach the site. However, its a bit
>>> drastic, so I'll write about the first time round when we just rebranded
>>> without any major changes to the UX.
>>>
>>> As you say, branch first, nothing is going to be pretty for a while.
>>> After that we started by rewriting our application layout to use the new
>>> framework, and introduce the new design to any global elements on the page
>>> like navigation and sidebars. That also involved reworking a lot of
>>> partials that made up those elements. The key thing here was to start
>>> afresh with CSS which allowed us to avoid having two frameworks conflicting
>>> with each other.
>>>
>>> At this point the entire site was hideously broken in the most literal
>>> sense. Now begins the gradual process of updating every view in your
>>> application - hopefully its been built with some sort of reusable
>>> components in the frontend which will make this easier, but ultimately
>>> you're going to be reworking a lot of CSS classes.
>>>
>>> Once that's done, its time for some pretty extensive testing. We ran a
>>> beta period where we slowly rolled the new design out, first to staff, and
>>> then to some of our more friendly customers.
>>>
>>> Something we didn't get the chance to do, and I wish I could remember
>>> the name of the tool, was to run the entire site through a tool which can
>>> pick up any unused CSS classes in the HTML, and find any unused CSS
>>> definitions. If you've got decent integration test coverage it should be
>>> enough to run your suite of tests and see what that brings up.
>>>
>>> Hopefully that's of some help - I'm working from memories of something
>>> we did in 2013, so its a bit rough!
>>>
>>> Jon
>>>
>>> On Fri, 18 Mar 2016 at 14:56 Jesse Waites <jesse.waites at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hello everyone,
>>>>
>>>> I've recently started a new job and one of my first orders of business
>>>> is to reskin the app. It basically looks like hot garbage right now and my
>>>> boss wants me to redesign it with a proper framework, etc. I am also
>>>> looking forward to this because I have a pretty good design eye and it will
>>>> be cool to have complete ownership of the look and feel of a production web
>>>> app.
>>>>
>>>> I have started with making some general UI mockups in Balsamiq and have
>>>> approval to implement this design from upstairs.
>>>>
>>>> I suppose I will simply create a new branch and start adding the
>>>> framework, and start redesigning this maybe a controller at a time, hitting
>>>> each view in each controller? That seems like a reasonable approach to me.
>>>>
>>>> I know how to technically do this but I'm curious about the best
>>>> overall strategy to reskin (Add a new front end / UI) a rails app. If
>>>> someone has done this before and wouldn't mind writing about their process
>>>> / best practices for something like this, I would appreciate it.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Jesse Waites
>>>> JesseWaites.com
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>>
>>
>> --
>> Jesse Waites
>> JesseWaites.com
>>
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