Gesso

Gesso is a Sass-based and Pattern Lab integrated starter theme that outputs accessible HTML5 markup. It uses a mobile-first responsive approach and leverages SMACSS to organize styles as outlined in the Drupal 8 CSS architecture guidelines. This encourages a component-based approach to theming through the creation of discrete, reusable UI elements. Gesso is heavily integrated with Pattern Lab and the Component Libraries module, allowing Drupal and Pattern Lab to share the same markup.

For more information, view the Gesso Drupal project page or Gesso GitHub repo. To submit bug reports or feature requests, visit the Gesso issue queue. Also available for WordPress.

Global Prerequisites

The following packages need to be installed on your system in order to use Gesso.

• npm
• gulp

In addition, in order to compile Twig files, Pattern Lab requires that PHP be available on the command line.

Installation

1. Place the Gesso theme in your site’s theme directory. (e.g., themes/gesso) Read documentation on installing themes for more information.

2. Install the Component Libraries module. Since many of the Drupal templates reference twig files inside Pattern Lab using Twig namespaces, this module is required for the theme to function.

3. Enable the Gesso Helpers module. This module comes packaged with the theme, but must be manually enabled for the theme to function.

4. Optional: Install the Twig Field Value module. This is not required, but will make working with Twig templates easier.

5. Optional: Install the Twig Tweak module. This is not required, but will make working with Twig templates easier.

6. Optional: Because Gesso is a starter theme, you may want to rename the Gesso directory or copy its contents to a new custom theme directory based on the name of your project.

The easiest way to accomplish this is to use Drush. Type drush gesso --help for more information.

If you can’t use Drush, then manually replace all instances of 'gesso' within this directory with a machine-readable name of your choice, including folder names, filenames, and all occurrences within files. This custom name must start with a letter and may only contain lowercase letters, numbers, and underscores.

Edit the .info.yml file and update the theme name and description. You can also change the screenshot image (images/screenshot.png) shown on the Appearance admin page.

Compiling Pattern Lab and Sass

LibSass is required to compile the Sass into CSS. Gesso includes Gulp tasks to compile the CSS and generate the compiled Pattern Lab files and to watch both for changes. To use these tasks, first run the following NPM command in the theme folder.

npm install

To initiate the Gulp build tasks that compile the Sass and Pattern Lab files and watch for changes, run the following command in the theme directory:

gulp

To initiate the Gulp build tasks only (without watching for changes), run the following command in the theme directory:

gulp gessoBuild

Accessing Pattern Lab

To access the Pattern Lab instance, append /pattern-lab/public/index.html to your site URL and theme directory (e.g. http://localhost:8080/themes/gesso/pattern-lab/public/index.html) or, if developing locally, just open that index.html file directly in the browser from your file system.

Creating New Components

Gesso includes a script to generate new component files. To use, run the following command in the theme folder.

node component

Build Artifacts

By default, the compiled Pattern Lab and Sass files (e.g., /pattern-lab/ and /css/) are ignored by Git as these files are built during deployment. To change this, edit the included .gitignore file.

Sass/Gulp dependencies

• Breakpoint: Easy to write media queries.

• Sass: CSS on steroids. Adds nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance, and more.

• Sass Globbing: Adds glob-based imports to Sass.

• Autoprefixer: Adds necessary browser CSS property prefixes during Sass compilation.

Stylelint

Stylelint is used to lint Sass files. Warnings will break the build, so if you have a valid reason to break Stylelint rules you can have it ignore code in two ways:

1. Add /* stylelint-disable-next-line */ to the line just before where the Stylelint warning is triggered.

2. To ignore several lines, add /* stylelint-disable */ before the code in question and add /* stylelint-enable */ afterwards.

Maintainers

The Gesso theme is maintained by Dan Mouyard (@dcmouyard), Shawn Brackat (@shawnbrackat) and Corey Lafferty (@coreylafferty).

Please use the Github issue queue: https://github.com/forumone/gesso/issues