graphen

Graphen UI library

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About

'graphen' is a small library, that keeps reusable blocks of UI and helps making application design consistent across multiple projects.

Motivation and principles

Motivation for building graphen is to create a small, reusable and customizable UI library that will follow current best practices in the CSS world and allow to create clean and easily maintainable code.

Graphen architecture is driven by:

Namespacing

Every style or variable name are prefixed, so developer will have knowledge where from the style or variable is coming from what is its role. All variables and styles are prefixed with the following pattern: g[b|c|m|x]-<semantic name>.

• g - responsibility of the first letter is to tells developers what is the origin of the entity (where to look when necessary) and to avoid naming collision (although probability is low)
• b|c|x|m - the second letter tells developers what is the role of (or how to use) a particular entity
  • b - branding, variables that can be overwritten for custom styling
  • c - component (BEM block), a style that can be applied for markups (along with elements and modifiers)
  • m - BEM mix, that can apply a generic style not related with particular block or element
  • x - mixin, which can extend our custom classes

Few examples:

• gb-color-success - variable representing a color
• gc-component gc-component__element gc-component--modifier - few component classes
• gm-pull-right - a mix class that allows to attach a generic class

Block Element Modifier

As mentioned above, graphen uses BEM naming convention which have two benefits, removing specificity issues and Block Element Modifier principle simplifies how to think about components and it sub-parts.

Object Oriented CSS

The last principle helps to separate component (BEM block) layouting from its skinning (BEM modifier), hence blocks when used (ex. gc-mycomponent) should have added at least default skin (ex gc-mycomponent--default). This principle helps to avoid overwriting CSS properties related with skinning (ex. color, background-color etc.) which is considered a bad practice but also reduces CSS file size.

Installation

1. Install as npm package: npm i graphen
2. Import style.scss (or particular components) into your project
3. In order to build font successfully, set $c-icon-font-url to point from your project root level (ex. ~graphen/src/assets/font)

Development

In order to develop with graphen you'll need to:

1. Clone graphen repository: git clone https://github.com/coda-it/graphen
2. Build example app: make example
3. Run example server in another bash window npm run example-run
4. After development check integration tests with make integration-test

Customization

Graphen allows to customize branding variables (palette of colors and font) to fit graphical requirements of the project it's used in. In order to customize, checkout src/variables/_brand.scss for particular variables that can be overwritten.

Others

• Name of colors are taken from here