[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #22862: Consider a CSS preprocessor

[WordPress Trac]

#22862: Consider a CSS preprocessor
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 Reporter:  chriswallace     |       Owner:
     Type:  feature request  |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal           |   Milestone:  Awaiting Review
Component:  Administration   |     Version:
 Severity:  normal           |  Resolution:
 Keywords:                   |
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Changes (by bpetty):

 * cc: bpetty (added)


Comment:

 From the software architecture perspective, this actually abstracts out
 even further.

 Obviously, implementing admin (or anything in WP) in SASS or LESS would
 require adding at least one of the preprocessors to WP. At it's very basic
 level, LESS is definitely the easiest, and is already possible to do from
 plugins and themes. However, we're really not just talking about admin-
 only here. Whatever solution is in place, it's going to need to give
 plugins and themes options as well, and it's likely not going to be
 adequate unless it gives at least both options of SASS and LESS, not to
 mention CoffeeScript.

 What we're really talking about here is an asset management system much
 like the Rails [http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html asset
 pipeline], or the CakePHP [https://github.com/markstory/asset_compress
 Asset Compress] plugin, except, WP would probably be best using the
 [https://github.com/kriswallsmith/assetic Assetic] PHP library currently
 used by most Symfony developers. We're already half way there with
 WP_Scripts and WP_Styles. This would just extend those.

 The ideal system here would handle not just preprocessing of a variety of
 popular formats, but also minification, and combination of both CSS and JS
 (as a replacement for what we already do using a Subversion asset
 minification bot). It would leave everyone the option of using any
 preprocessor they want or not using one at all, so admin could be left in
 plain CSS (which Helen has some good arguments for) while a theme might
 choose to use SASS markup, and a plugin might include some LESS styles.

 The problem with all of this is that any system implementing asset
 management (except for a LESS-only system) relies very heavily on either a
 high performance persistent cache (which WP rarely has available in almost
 all shared environments) or at least write access to a public temporary
 directory for serving out generated assets just like most page caching
 plugins use so the web server can properly manage expiration and caching.
 There are sites where WP works without filesystem write access though
 (imagine anyone not using media, or using an S3 media plugin). Without
 either of those, the best WP can do is serve processed assets directly
 from transients (in other words, PHP/WP initialization and a database hit
 for all assets). That would result in terrible performance, and should
 never be imposed on anyone.

 So with that in mind, I don't think this proposal should even be
 considered right now, leaving this to plugin territory for now.

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Ticket URL: <http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/22862#comment:4>
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