Description
Single mega-issue to track all work and longform explain 3.0 goals and direction. Buckle up.
Acknowledgement: I highly respect Moving Fractal Forwards for publically summarizing their road ahead and wanted to take the time to do the same here, as we got a lot in motion too.
Pattern Lab Node has enjoyed tremendous interest from its humble roots. I have y'all to thank for its continued relevance and success. Thank you to everyone who has used the tool, encouraged me, contributed back, reported issues, and shared what they've built - it's humbling and intimidating and represents to me the best in open source. I know it's used everywhere from Fortune 50 companies, to major open source foundations, to agencies, to individual users. I've even seen Pattern Lab experience show up in job descriptions. what?!
Opportunities
And with this growth has come increased awareness of the library's shortcomings. I'll attempt to list and address some here:
It's too hard to use Pattern Lab as a dependency
- Complete?
Pattern Lab 1.0 was a monolithic monstrosity of grunt and gulp tasks, all assets, and the core library all delivered in one repository. Pattern Lab 2.0 introduced the Pattern Lab Ecosystem which went a long way toward achieving more modularization. But still, Pattern Lab Node was not oriented well for direct consumption. We intend to fix this with Pattern Lab Node 3.0 with the introduction of the CLI (command line interface).
The CLI will encapsulate Pattern Lab core functionality and provide a consistent, well-documented means to access it. It will allow users to initialize a new Pattern Lab instance anywhere, even as a dependency in a larger project. It will exhibit much of the functionality currently shipping within editions.
The great news is that the CLI is already in alpha, created by the wonderful @raphaelokon. A couple small things remain for this to hit the big time. Be excited, because I sure am!
- Complete?
Pattern Lab build times are increasingly slow with increasing numbers and complexity of patterns
Issues like this one started cropping up with evolution of the tool. It also led to some mismanagement on my part of potential solutions. The amazing, knock-your-socks-off good news is that this problem has been tackled with the stellar contribution of @tburny and Incremental Builds. In some non-scientific testing against a large pattern tree, this new feature decreased build times 7-fold. I've long wanted to do a spike on performance, and this feature preempted my best efforts and goes a long way toward making performance problems a thing of the past.
@geoffp is also laying the ground work to make the entire library run asynchronously - with the side benefit of adding performance.
- Complete?
Staying "up to date" with edition-node-gulp/editon-node-grunt is too difficult
Because of the architecture of Pattern Lab Node 2.X - grunt and gulp editions performed too much work on behalf of users. Your shipped gruntfile/gulpfile has many brittle tasks that I consider plumbing. We will be black-boxing most of that functionality in the future. For example, you don't need to know how we copy source/_js to public/js, just that we do, and if you want to do something, you operate on whichever destination makes the most since for you.
- Complete?
Because we shipped with all our guts hanging out, updates were always messy, manual affairs we had to announce and pray people noticed. It's annoying to have to integrate gulp/grunt tasks into your own build chain.
Also, my choice to use gulp 4 has led to too much confusion. The advent of the CLI will do away with the need for nearly any grunt or gulp tasks. The existing editions will be major revved and become even simpler example repositories. New repositories, patternlab-node-gulp and patternlab-node-grunt will expose thin wrappers for consumption, if need be.
- Complete?
The Getting Started experience could use a better UX
I want to make Pattern Lab even more approachable than it is now. Starterkits and demo.patternlab.io provide some direction, but I've been asked a number of times how one "starts". I think this is part tooling and part workflow. I am planning some additional content to address this, and excited at the prospects. Stay tuned.
- Complete?
Customizing the Pattern Lab UI is not intuitive or for the casual user
Forking StyleguideKit Assets Default is not the simplest endeavor, but can lead to complete customization of the Pattern Lab user interface. I want to reduce this barrier to entry even further by providing a simple plugin for UI theming and menu extension. It's on the list. It will happen.
- Complete?
Pattern Lab Node plugin installation is a bit wonky
Feedback from users is that plugin installation is odd and annoying on update. I plan to improve this by putting more configuration into patternlab-config.json in the near future, to, for example, configure the tabs to add to plugin node tab at any time.
- Complete?
Pattern Lab could do more to chase the holy grail
Features like Exporting Patterns aim to make Pattern Lab output more consumable. I want to know in what other ways we can do better. Let us know.
- Complete?
Issue / PR Bankruptcy
I've let some PRs and issues grow stale, irrelevant, or the codebase has just plain evolved since they were opened. If I offend anyone with closure, please know that it is not out of disregard or disrespect for your work - it's just that there is only so much that can be reviewed, and only so much that can be prioritized out of my free time. My mismanagement of some PRs, whether in letting them get stale, or in not providing enough directional re-alignment earlier, is to me the single biggest failure I've had with the project (besides laughably poor code at times). I hope to continue to work with you all and by all means re-open anything you still see as relevant and are willing to carry forward constructively.
A Note About the Spec
Just because we will be incrementing the module's major version does not mean we are departing from the Pattern Lab 2 specification. I still plan to embrace all of the goodness that Dave baked into the re-write, with a strong emphasis on keeping a modular solution moving forward. There is now even an Acid Test Starterkit to test nuanced issues across the platform. I will be adding a new key to package.json or patternlab-config.json to signify this spec compliance version number.
Support Pattern Lab Node
I've set up a Patreon account to directly support continued work on the Pattern Lab Node project.
I need help and support to make Pattern Lab Node a sustained success. I devote a lot of free time and would-be sleep to make the project what it is, but nothing compares to hearing back from users. It means the world to me when people find value in Pattern Lab Node. I am ridiculously humbled to hear and see what y'all build with it.
If you find yourself here and balk and the idea of supporting open source software monetarily - I understand. Carry on, but please do share what you build - we all learn more together.