What is our ideal theme development workflow?

[marcelosomers]

I've run into several questions around customizing themes that we should talk about

Customizing the example theme

• We should probably have some sort of development mechanism for testing this theme, since it doesn't do much by default
  • I've temporarily added some grunt tasks in the feature/dev-mode branch that will copy the theme files to a destination on your local machine for testing (e.g., the example library or your own dev library) - theoretically it'd work like PatternPack's grunt:integrate task
  • The default grunt:watch in PatternPack does well with watching for updates to the theme .hbs files, but it doesn't seem to track updates to the CSS, JS, etc.. If we go down this path, we should verify PatternPack watches all your theme files by default

DIY Theme

This presumes you're building your own theme for PatternPack.

• Theoretically the standard development workflow for doing this would be to copy the contents of the example theme into your project and passing in the theme option to PatternPack
• If you do this, the example theme currently handles it's own CSS compilation. What's should our suggested development workflow be for that? Here are a few ideas:
  • Manually add tasks to your PatternPack implementation to compile the theme CSS
    • This comes with the added overhead of making sure you've assigned your theme tasks to compile and build properly - seems like a headache
  • Incorporate more custom theme enhancements into PatternPack where it handles all your CSS stuff

I skew toward the second option which will be more development effort, but will make it easier to start up a pattern library with a custom theme.