Bower?

[jrmhaig]

@billz

Quick question. Do you use Bower for package management or are all the files and directories a carry-over from where you copied the theme in the first place? I'm considering a clean-up but thought I would check first.

[billz]

@jrmhaig Bower is indeed for package management and came across from the SB Admin 2 theme.

Excluding bower_components will reduce the size of the repo, however there are different opinions on the best way of handling these dependencies. I've thought of excluding this folder and making bower install part of the the Quick Install process. This way, only bower.json is needed and everything stays current. The potential downside is a dependency change breaking the app or network issues preventing things from loading correctly.

There are pros and cons to both approaches. I opted to preserve the directory but am open to ideas.

[jrmhaig]

Thanks. There appear to be a lot of unnecessary CSS and Javascript that is being pulled in as a dependency of the theme so I am thinking about cleaning it up. For example, metis and morris appear to be quite powerful libraries but are not actually used.

When I tried installing Bower I got the warning that it is deprecated and Yarn should be used instead. What do you think about this? On the other hand, if I am able to recreate what SB Admin 2 gives us in plain Bootstrap it may be possible just to have the bootstrap css and js files plus a file or two for our own customisation and then Bower/Yarn would be overkill.

Also, from what I have read Bower/Yarn are intended for Javascript applications while RaspAP is mainly PHP and has minimal Javascript.

I'll see what I can do in a branch.

[jrmhaig]

I have created a branch here:

https://github.com/billz/raspap-webgui/tree/restyle

Most of the changes are removing anything Bower related. I have then put Bootstrap into css/, js/ and fonts/ as well as putting JQuery, which is a dependency of Bootstrap, into js/. The index.php has then been modified to use this instead of SB Admin 2.

It does look a bit different. In particular, I didn't realise that SB Admin 2 had changed the default colours, but these can be tweaked.

Thoughts?

[billz]

Looks good to me. Much cleaner and it preserves Bootstrap, which is really the core. I cleared my cache and didn't notice any obvious changes in the UI.

If/when fancy menus and graphs are needed, we can look at reintroducing things like Metis and Morris. For now I'd say this a nice improvement.

Would you like to put this into a pull request?

[billz]

Ah, I see what you mean about the colors now. Did you include /dist/css/custom.css + sb-admin-2.css? The Auth and System menus don't seem to load correctly 🤔

[jrmhaig]

I'm holding off creating a pull request because I haven't actually tried it on a Pi yet so I haven't checked that it is OK. You appear to have already found a couple of broken links.

Also, I'll have a look to see if I can get the colours back. I deliberately cut it back to just the basic Bootstrap but haven't got round to reintroducing the styling from sb-admin-2 that we actually want.

[billz]

@jrmhaig closing this for now. Feel free to reopen the issue so we can track progress. Thanks.