Advanced Web Starter Kit

To boldly go where no man has gone before

---

How to use

1. Clone or download and unpack to desired location
2. Download and install latest version of node.js
3. Install GraphicsMagick (recommended) or ImageMagick for your OS. Note: it's mandatory to install one of them before running npm install
4. Set your environment variables [guide]
5. Install project dependencies: npm install
6. (optional) Add your repository to Travis for automatic tests
7. (optional) Set up Continuous Deployment with CircleCI or Werker Docker following our guide
8. Code live with: npm start or npm start -- --hmr if you need Hot Module Reloading
9. Build with: npm run build
10. Deploy and enjoy your life

What's inside?

• Reasonable structure for frontend projects
• Static pages generation
• Prepared configs for quick Continuous Deployment and automatic tests setup
• Grunt with pre-configured tasks
• Nunjucks, a full featured templating engine
• In-built Nunjucks globals and filters for formatting numbers, dates, getting current page url, locale, breadcrumb, etc.
• Human readable urls
• Boilerplate files based on best practices
• i18n with node-gettext and configured layouts to properly declare current locale and alternate urls
• Sass compiler with source maps generation, autoprefixing, optimization, minification and linting
• Ekzo Sass framework
• Webpack with ES6 support, managing and bundling JavaScript dependencies and optional hot module reloading or blazing fast watch
• standard for linting and automatic formatting JavaScript
• Live reload powered by webpack-dev-server
• Runtime type annotation and data validation with tcomb and tcomb-validation, built-in handy refinements.
• Preconfigured meta tags for Open Graph and Twitter Cards
• Commonly used by search providers structured data based on RDFa
• Automatic sitemap.xml generation with grunt-sitemap-xml
• Automatic sprites generation with Spritesmith
• Automatic images compression via TinyPNG
• Automatic responsive images generation with grunt-responsive-images
• Separate not optimized files in development, and
• Compiled and minified files for production

And a lot more under the hood. We just didn't have time to document all features. Yet.

Documentation

Work in progress

• Structure
• Environment variables
• Data
• Structured data
• URLs
• Continuous Delivery
• Recipes

Examples

Deployed version of Kotsu from master branch can be found here.

Note that Examples section so far features only least part of predefined elements and features.

Browsers support

JavaScript

IE	Edge	Chrome	Firefox	Safari	Opera	Opera Mobile	iOS Safari	Android
9+	12+	21+	28+	6.1+	12.1+	12.1+	7+	4+

To enable ES6 features in IE11 and below, uncomment import 'babel-polyfill' in main.js. See details here.

Default build shipped with jQuery 3.1.0+ which doesn't support IE8. Replace it with pre 3.0.0 version if you need support of IE8.

CSS

IE	Edge	Chrome	Firefox	Safari	Opera	Opera Mobile	iOS Safari	Android
10+	12+	21+	28+	6.1+	12.1+	12.1+	7.1+	4.4+

Refer to Ekzo Browsers Support section for details about graceful regression for IE9 and below, which included in Kotsu by default.

To disable graceful regressions for older IE, remove IE() macro call from base layout.

Outdated Browser message

In IE9 and below users will see banner before page content with message about outdated browser and link to Outdated Browser.

To disable Outdated Browser message, remove OutdatedBrowser() macro call from base layout.

License

Copyright 2014 LotusTM. Licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.