Consider migrating to bootstrap

gravitystorm commented 8 years ago

Currently we have our own CSS framework, originally developed by an external design agency. However, this has a few limitations:

Poor support for mobile. Few pages on the site resize sensibly for narrow screens and this has been painful when demonstrating it to new people, all of whom were checking it out on their phones.
Lots of layout glitches. Often it feels like positioning is now a hack on top of a hack - see https://github.com/cyclestreets/cyclescape/issues/568 https://github.com/cyclestreets/cyclescape/issues/558
Lots of hidden layout constraints. When I was redesigning some of the dashboard pages it became obvious that, for example, missing user images lead to other text becoming out of alignment, rather than using a proper grid layout.
None of us really knows how our layout system works. It was built by an external agency and new developers joining this project need to learn it all from scratch, if at all. It would be better to leverage a more common framework.
We don't benefit from other open-source developments. Our framework has had no fundamental improvements for almost 5 years. We don't have people fixing browser edge-cases or adapting it to modern devices.

So I think we should migrate from our home-grown CSS framework onto a maintained, open-source alternative. I recommend bootstrap v3 because it has good integrations with rails, and it even has good integrations with formtastic, and it's very popular so our developers (now and future) will find it familiar. I use bootstrap on multiple other rails + formtastic apps that I currently maintain.

What does everyone else think? My idea is to bring in bootstrap alongside our existing CSS and to keep the design of the site unchanged. If we think this is a good idea I'm happy to start working on it but I thought it best to give an overview and hear feedback first.

nikolai-b commented 8 years ago

I would be in favor of this. I find our CSS has slowed me down considerably and feels very much un-maintained.

smsm1 commented 8 years ago

+1 One of the things that puts me off using Cyclescape is the lack of a usable UI on mobile. I'd love to be out in the field and being able to submit issues on my phone, without having to remember to do so when I get home.

jf1 commented 8 years ago

+1

On 22 June 2016 at 21:52, Shaun McDonald notifications@github.com wrote:

+1 One of the things that puts me off using Cyclescape is the lack of a usable UI on mobile. I'd love to be out in the field and being able to submit issues on my phone, without having to remember to do so when I get home.

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gravitystorm commented 8 years ago

OK, I'll have a stab at this after we get staging deployed again (see #592 ).

mvl22 commented 7 years ago

More support on Twitter for making the site mobile-friendly:

https://twitter.com/bikesandbabies/status/807547726586114049

mvl22 commented 7 years ago

I'm going to commission some design work from a designer, to help move this forward.

Aim will not be a full-scale redesign but making the codebase more manageable and doing various modernisations.

cyclestreets / cyclescape

Consider migrating to bootstrap #591