integrate with website builders

[lexoyo]

hi @jeremyckahn i love this tool so far, great idea ! i'm developing a lot on silex these days (silex.me) i would love to see how we could make mantra help silex users :) i ask a friend who uses silex to make website what he thinks about mantra to animate elements of his websites

[jeremyckahn]

Hi @lexoyo, I’m glad you’re liking Mantra! Thanks for the kind words. silex.me seems like a really cool tool/service, and I’d love to see Mantra integrated with it! It should be very doable, though a few modifications might have to be made depending on how you plan to integrate it.

Did you have any specific questions on how to do this?

[lexoyo]

I did not think a lot about it but the UI could be a button in the elements properties

When clicked it would open mantra (iframe? Or new Mantra()?) passing it the element css selector + the data Mantra created... When the anim is modified in Mantra Silex needs the data + css for the anim

I am not sure if it is possible/simple...

[jeremyckahn]

I would imagine that loading and instantiating Mantra directly would be preferable to an iframe, but every project is a little different! One major advantage of loading directly is that you'll be able to access the CSS that Mantra generates much more easily. Here's how you might listen for timeline updates and get the latest CSS export:

const { mantra } = window

mantra.on('rekapi:timelineModified', () => {
  // Generates a big string of CSS keyframes
  const css = mantra.collectOne(
    'cssAnimationString', 
    mantra.collectOne('cssConfigObject')
  )
})

(EDIT: ⬆️ is a little dangerous, please see my next comment!)

I don't think you'll have to worry too much about window pollution, as I've tried to keep Mantra pretty self-contained: https://github.com/jeremyckahn/mantra/search?q=window&unscoped_q=window

Does this help?

[jeremyckahn]

I experimented with the above snippet a bit more, and I realized that you will probably not want to bind an expensive operation to the 'rekapi:timelineModified' event, as that fires quite a bit and can lock up the browser. 😬

You'll probably just want to do this to fetch the generated CSS once your app actually needs it:

const css = mantra.collectOne(
  'cssAnimationString', 
  mantra.collectOne('cssConfigObject')
)

That's a fairly expensive operation, so you'll want to avoid calling it too often!

[lexoyo]

This is useful info thx

I suppose there is an easy way to set the current animation? What is the data source like? The json maybe?

I'll try to make a first prototype and we will see what is easy and what is not :)

[jeremyckahn]

The fundamental APIs to do what you need are there, though admittedly some of them are not documented particularly well. This function will set the current animation within Mantra: https://github.com/jeremyckahn/mantra/blob/28949b050e3e05b3555b2adca22c216f9e38ae25/scripts/mantra.js#L139-L169

You can access it globally, and it accepts Rekapi timelineData.

mantra.loadTimeline({ ... })

You can also retrieve the current timeline data: https://github.com/jeremyckahn/mantra/blob/28949b050e3e05b3555b2adca22c216f9e38ae25/scripts/components/rekapi/main.js#L153-L174

Which can be accessed globally:

mantra.rekapiComponent.exportTimeline()

These methods deal with the same data format, so something like this would reload the current timeline:

mantra.loadTimeline(mantra.rekapiComponent.exportTimeline())

Granted, there's no real reason to reload the current timeline, but this snippet shows how these functions can be used in an interoperable way.

Let me know if this clarifies things for you!