alphagov / govuk-frontend

GOV.UK Frontend contains the code you need to start building a user interface for government platforms and services.
https://frontend.design-system.service.gov.uk/
MIT License
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Question about support for other templating languages #829

Closed davidjamesstone closed 6 years ago

davidjamesstone commented 6 years ago

This looks like a good start to better organising the various patterns used across govuk.

I'm a bit confused though about where this leaves some of the other available packages.

We currently use nodejs with hapijs across our suite of govuk services. Our template of choice is handlebars, used via the govuk_template_mustache package on npm.

It looks like this govuk-frontend is raw html or nunjucks. Does this mean you will only support these going forward, and users need to move to one of these two, or will the govuk_template_mustache (+ it's various other package for other template languages) be kept up to date?

Many thanks

kr8n3r commented 6 years ago

Hi @davidjamesstone, thanks for getting in touch. GOV.UK Elements, Template and Frontend Toolkit will remain for the time being with basic maintenance support.

We are considering various options for the template, but I doubt it will be available in the same number of languages.

davidjamesstone commented 6 years ago

Thanks @igloosi - it's useful to know the direction.

TBH - I don't have a lot of enthusiasm about nunjucks. We have a dozen production govuk services built on the stack outlined above, rewriting them in nunjucks isn't really an option, or desirable.

Anyway - nice start - I'll keep an eye on where it goes & hopefully you'll have support for mustache or similar logic-less templates soon.

Many thanks.

36degrees commented 6 years ago

Hi David,

We’ve written in a little more detail about our decisions around templating in our architecture repo, which I hope might provide some clarity.

We provide the Nunjucks templates because we think that they are useful for users of the Prototype Kit and for teams who are already building production systems using Nunjucks. We are not suggesting or expecting that all teams across government should now be using it. We hope that most departments or teams will build their own abstraction layer (templates or macros for the components they use) in the templating language of their choice.

Hope that helps – I'm going to close this issue for now, but if you have any further questions please do re-open it.

Ollie