The Great Gulp Redesign™

[pfist]

Tasks

• [x] New code architecture to accommodate Gulp #4
• [x] Replace metalsmith-sass with gulp-sass
• [x] Add gulp-autoprefixer
• [ ] Add image optimization
• [x] Add JS optimization
• [ ] Explore caching/incremental build plugins
• [x] Create Gulp task series to match Yoko commands

Why Gulp?

Most of Yoko's file processing currently relies on Metalsmith and its plugin ecosystem. Unfortunately, some of the plugins contain old/deprecated dependencies. I could submit PRs to update those plugins, but right now I think my time is better spent working on Yoko. I also considered using the vanilla modules (i.e. autoprefixer instead of metalsmith-autoprefixer), but integrating them with Metalsmith is difficult.

I'd like to migrate from Metalsmith to Gulp, for a few reasons:

• Better plugin ecosystem
• More flexible build chain
• Great caching plugins for incremental building
• Easy to integrate with BrowserSync
• Any Gulp task can run a Metalsmith instance
• I like the API

This first phase of the migration will involve a complete redesign of the code architecture for Yoko as well as replacing any asset-related plugins with Gulp equivalents. Content and template processing will require a more significant effort, so I'm punting that to a future release for now. Gulp will handle asset processing and overall build task management. Metalsmith will continue to handle content and templates.

[pfist]

Sass and content building tasks are working great now. Still need to add support for compiling JS and optimizing images.

[pfist]

JS optimization is in! Currently supports concatenation via gulp-concat and squashes files with gulp-butternut.