While Next.js can handle static sites, we've had a few issues with it, notably a performance hit at runtime and some bugginess around routing and SSR. Gatsby being fully intended for high-performance static sites makes it a great technical fit for the Shields frontend. The `createPages()` API should be a really nice way to add a page for each service family, for example.
This migrates the frontend from Next.js to Gatsby. Gatsby is a powerful tool, which has a bit of downside as there's a lot to dig through. Overall I found configuration easier than Next.js. There are a lot of plugins and for the most part they worked out of the box. The documentation is good.
Links are cleaner now: there is no #. This will break old links though perhaps we could add some redirection to help with that. The only one I’m really concerned about `/#/endpoint`. I’m not sure if folks are deep-linking to the category pages.
There are a lot of enhancements we could add, in order to speed up the site even more. In particular we could think about inlining the SVGs rather than making separate requests for each one.
While Gatsby recommends GraphQL, it's not required. To keep things simple and reduce the learning curve, I did not use it here.
Close#1943Fix#2837Fix#2616
The CSS in the project is relatively difficult to change. While it is very DRY, it relies heavily on inheritance. It's difficult to make changes in the markup modal without it also affecting styles elsewhere.
[styled-components](https://www.styled-components.com/) is one of the leading CSS-in-JS libraries. By reducing dependency on global state and CSS inheritance, styles become explicit and are easier to inspect and change. It's also convenient that styles can be embedded with the components they modify.
At runtime, the library creates CSS classes, so it's pretty efficient.
We were using a little bit of [styled-jsx](https://github.com/zeit/styled-jsx) before, which ships with Next.js, though styled-components is more widely used and I've had good experiences with it all around.
In a few cases I've duplicated styles where it feels more natural to do that: for example, `text-align: center` is duplicated in `Main` and `MarkupModal`.
Much of this is a refactor, though there are a few visual changes, particularly in the markup modal and the style examples.
- Present 'downloads', 'version', etc as pages
- Don't show any badges on the index page,
just links to categories.
- Tweak search so we can search all badges
from the index page, but without rendering
every badge as soon as we press a key.
I rewrote the frontend in React using a module bundler. It's matched feature-for-feature with the current frontend, with only slight changes in the styling. I did not fuss about making the styling identical; the badge popup looks particularly different.
This makes the front end much easier to develop. I'm really looking forward to implementing #701, to which this paves the way.
This makes light use of Next.js, which provides webpack config and dev/build tooling. We’ll probably replace it with create-react-app or our own webpack setup because unfortunately it comes with a lot of runtime overhead (the build is 400k).
Let’s open new issues for bugs and features, and track other follow-ups here: https://github.com/badges/shields/projects/1
