I have an idea for a css compression feature that I would like to see added to Symfony. It's possibly that there are already plans for something like for Symfony afoot of which I am not aware... please let me know if I didn't look in the right place to spot it. If not, I've already implemented some code which might be used as a basis for this feature.
The company I work for is using Symfony as a base for a relatively complex web application for a museum. The system of stylesheets we have developed is relatively complicated. The main stylesheet (main.css) actually contains nothing but a series of @import statements to bring in 9 secondary stylesheets, which are named by their contents (form.css, text.css, layout.css, and so on). We did this to avoid having one monster stylesheet that it is impossible to find anything in. The problem with this, of course, is that the first time you hit the site you have to wait for the main.css to be loaded and parsed, and then for the 9 separate stylesheets to get loaded. For the production site it's better to have as many of your styles as possible in one file to avoid multiple http requests. For our project I created a system to deal with this: * The 'source' or original stylesheets are kept in web/css/src. * When you look at the site in the development environment, all the paths to stylesheets are automatically changed to point to css/src so you can see your changes immediately. I accomplished this by means of a filter, but if it was a core feature it could be better integrated. * I created a pake task for generating the production css files. Running 'symfony compress-css' looks in 'css/src' and outputs compressed versions of those files to the 'css' folder. Not only that, but it parses each css file for import statements and replaces them with the contents of the file that was imported before doing that. * I used a naming convention to allow the pake task to skip processing any of the css files which are only used as an import into a parent file. For instance, if main.css imports several files, those files might be named main_layout.css, main_form.css, and so on. That's about it. I'm not convinced that the naming conventions I set up are perfect, but I think it is a valuable feature. I also think that the same idea could be extended to allow for the automatic shrinking and combination of javascript files with similar benefits. Is there any interest in this feature? And if so, what is the best path for contributing code? David Brewer Programmer Second Story Interfactive --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "symfony developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/symfony-devs?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
