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

[Jesse Waites]

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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