Athena Framework

A front-end web framework for UCF websites and applications. Developed and maintained by UCF Web Communications.

Quick Links

• Framework Documentation
• Development
• Contributing
• License

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Development

These instructions are for installation and development of the project for core development of the Athena Framework. If you're looking for instructions for installing and using the framework in your project, see our documentation.

Installation requirements

• Node.js 5.6.0+
• gulp-cli 2.0.0+

Installation instructions

1. Clone the framework repository onto your machine:

   git clone [email protected]:UCF/Athena-Framework.git

2. Navigate to the root Athena-Framework/ directory and install dependencies:

   cd Athena-Framework/

   npm install

3. (Optional) Create a copy of gulp-config.template.json, modify settings as needed for your local development environment (available options are listed below), and save as gulp-config.json.

4. Run an initial full build of the framework, documentation, and examples:

   gulp setup

That's it! Once you've finished all those steps, the root directory of the repo should look like this:

 ├── _docs/
 ├── _examples/
 ├── dist/
 ├── docs/
 ├── docs-local/
 ├── examples/
 ├── node_modules/
 ├── src/
 └── ...

(We're excluding git-related files in this example, as well as your gulp-config.json and the top-level config files that should have been cloned down from the project on Github, such as gulpfile.js and package.json).

Here's a rundown of what's in each of these directories:

_docs/

Contains source files for the framework's documentation. Athena's docs are built on 11ty, a Node-based static site generator, meaning that they consist primarily of Markdown files.

Documentation files get built to one of two locations: docs-local/ or docs/. docs/ contains production-ready files intended to be served via Github Pages, and requires some unique options that we can't use for local testing. Because of this, the documentation site will only get built to docs/ when Athena's maintainers publish a new tag. If you're working on updates to Athena's documentation, you'll always build changes to docs-local/.

_examples/

Contains source files for local example pages that you can use to test changes to the framework against. Like the framework docs, these framework pages are built on 11ty (but they are totally separate 11ty instances.)

The examples site will get built to examples/.

dist/

Contains distributable framework files, including fallback fonts, minified CSS, and minified JS.

docs/

Contains production-ready documentation files to be served on Github Pages. These files should never be edited directly or be included in commits to the repo--they'll only ever get changed by Athena's maintainers when a new release of the framework is published.

docs-local/

Contains your local copy of the built-out documentation site.

This directory is included in our .gitignore, so only changes to the source files (in _docs/) are tracked via git.

examples/

Contains built-out static site files for Athena's example pages, which are intended to be used for testing changes to the framework's core CSS and JS.

The examples/ directory is included in our .gitignore, so the examples site will never be committed to the main repo--the site exists strictly for local testing.

node_modules/

Contains project dependencies installed via npm.

src/

Contains the primary source files for the framework, including font files, Sass, and JavaScript.

Framework development workflow

The Athena Framework comes with an extensive set of gulp tasks, which we use as the primary means of automating repetitive tasks, such as minification, concatenation, and moving of files.

Your general workflow when working on the Athena Framework will look something like this:

1. Download + install the framework. Run gulp setup once before running watch tasks for the first time.
2. Run gulp watch to watch changes to Sass and JS files in src/, and automatically perform CSS and JS build steps whenever changes are made. Changes to example pages are also watched with this task.
3. When making changes to the docs, run gulp docs-watch to watch changes to files in _docs/ and rebuild your local copy of the documentation into docs-local/.

Gulp tasks are set up to save minified, distributable framework assets in dist/. Whenever you're committing changes to the framework, you should always include updated dist/ files in your commits.

However, documentation-related gulp tasks do not save distributable files to a tracked folder in the repo (docs-local/ is intentionally included in the project's .gitignore file). Commits for documentation-related changes should only include changes to files in _docs/; changes to production-ready documentation files (in docs/) are only made when new tags are released.

Gulp config options

Some key settings used in the framework's gulpfile are configurable via your gulp-config.json file. Available settings and their default values are listed below:

Option	Default	Description
examplesCSSKey	""	If you'd like to enable premium webfonts on your local examples files, you can specify the URL of a Cloud.Typography CSS key here (e.g. https://cloud.typography.com/000000/000000/css/fonts.css).

Gulp tasks

Our gulpfile contains a lot of functions and tasks--however, you likely won't (and probably shouldn't) use most of them directly. Listed below are the tasks you'll need to know about when working on the framework:

Task	Description
gulp setup	Runs a full build of the project--specifically, this task runs gulp default, gulp docs-local, and gulp examples.
gulp default	The primary task for building out distributable framework assets. Handles components (gulp components) and Sass and JS linting, compilation, and minification (gulp css and gulp js). Saves distributable files to dist/.
gulp watch	Watches changes to Sass files in src/scss/ and JS files in src/js/, and runs gulp css or gulp js, respectively, when those files change. Also watches changes to files in _examples/.
gulp components	Copies over required files from third-party components out of node_modules/ into designated places within the project.
gulp css	The primary CSS processing task for the framework. Lints and compiles Sass files in src/scss/, and saves minified distributable CSS to dist/css/. The framework's copyright header also gets prepended to the distributable CSS during this step.
gulp js	The primary JS processing task for the framework. Lints (most) JS files in src/js/, and then concatenates + minifies JS files in src/js/, saving distributable JS to dist/js/. The framework's copyright header also gets prepended to the distributable JS during this step.
gulp docs-local	The primary task for building out minified CSS and JS for the framework documentation, and for building a new local copy of the documentation site. The static documentation site will be built from _docs/ and saved to docs-local/. Due to the way our documentation project is set up, we create minified CSS and JS within _docs/ (in _docs/static/) before building the local site, not during the 11ty build process. This means that, whenever changes are made to the documentation's styles or scripts, the full gulp docs-local task should always be run, so that the generated minified files get copied to your local docs-local/ directory for you to view and test the changes.
gulp docs-watch	Watches changes to all files in _docs/ (except _docs/static/) and runs gulp docs-local) when changes are saved.
gulp examples	The primary task for building a local set of example files to test the framework against. Files from _examples/ will be built out as a static site and saved to examples/.

Contributing

We highly encourage feedback and suggestions from the UCF web development community. If you'd like to submit a feature request or known bug, check out our contributing guidelines.

License

The Athena Framework is released under the MIT License. Included third-party assets (such as webfonts and JavaScript libraries) may be released under separate licenses.

Documentation for the Athena Framework is released as a derivative of Bootstrap 4 alpha.6's documentation under Creative Commons.