Site Design Concept

[Alek-S]

Decided to throw something out there to get things moving for the design side. Below is my initial go at a homepage.

[peterpme]

This is a really great start, @Alek-S! How do you feel about using bootstrap to get the foundation (layout, font, colors) down?

[Alek-S]

Hey @peterpme , thanks for reaching back out, wasn't sure this was still active due to the radio silence.

I can put it together using Bootstrap, but would have a strong preference to just do it using vanilla CSS. I feel like I can turn it around faster, as it would be pretty straightforward using flexboxes. Also, I think the end result would be pretty lightweight, and easier for others to jump into and customize in the future.

Side question, are we thinking of keeping the site vanilla JS and HTML, or will we be looking to use a library (React)? I'm okay with either, but if we go React, I would throw out looking into Styled-Components as an idea as well. From work-related projects find it helps keep things small and modular when you got different people jumping in and out of components, and the learning curve is pretty small.

[peterpme]

Hey @Alek-S,

Thanks for the quick reply and apologies for the radio silence, I just moved back to Chicago and will start playing an active role in developing chicagojs!

I'm personally a huge fan of React and Gatsby. Gatsby is a static site generator. The current site is React and I think we'll be able to use it for this new one!

I agree that vanilla CSS is pretty straight forward and simple! That being said, I prefer to use a well-known framework because there's a good chance that anybody who will want to contribute will be at least familiar with how it works and there's one less thing we have to worry about writing (or arguing about 😄)

I love Styled Components and idea of CSS in JS! Since I've played a role in Emotion, I would prefer to use that =P. It's a very high performance css in js library with the same api. Kent C. Dodds recently deprecated glamorous in favor of emotion and you can read why in that thread.

[pcowgill]

@peterpme

+1 to Gatsby

Emotion looks really cool! styled-components has a lot more adoption as of right now - are you seeing some signals that emotion will get enough critical mass to have staying power and overtake styled-components? I know popularity is only one metric along with many other important considerations, but for the purposes of this question I'm assuming you've concluded that emotion is superior along many of the other dimensions. (Asking mostly out of personal curiosity.)

[peterpme]

Hey 😄

If Emotion doesn't already have critical mass, it's been gaining it very quickly. Spoiler: 50k weekly downloads.

Kent C. Dodds, a very reputable developer has deprecated his very popular CSS in JS library Glamorous, in favor of emotion.

Emotion's focus has been on engineering: high performance / very light weight. It's got a very robust api: it supports any type of styling / stylesheet you throw at it.

Sites that require 80-90+ on Lighthouse tend to like emotion more because of its focus on making sure things render really really quickly.

I would strongly recommend you check it out if you haven't yet! You'll be very pleased with the results 😄

https://github.com/emotion-js/emotion

[Alek-S]

I would be down to using emotion. Looking at the docs, doesn't look like that hard of a conceptual transition from styled-components.

With regard to the site, we should probably get a base file structure and boilerplate out of the way so we are working from a common foundation. I also saw the open issue for the Meetup API. I think it may better to get the API-related stuff out of the way before getting too deep into the FE to limit refactoring downstream.