Some thought from me:
- Most important talk from my point of view is to get the element library into Moodle core, and expand it to be a tool for communication between themers and developers:
- When themers are developing a theme, then can see all the kinds of things they need to design, and can verify their theme does a good job.
- When developers are implementing new functionality, they can see standard UI elements that they should be trying to use to realise their functionality. (Or patterns, as Urs refers to, and many developers like design patterns in software architecture already.)
- If a developer cannot find a way to implement a new feature using standard elements, they could be encouraged to suggest new elements to add to the library. That provides a mechanism for engaging themers in a debate about the proposed new element that is slightly abstracted from the very specific problem the developer is trying to solve.
- Certainly, the integrators should insist that for any new features going into Moodle core, any new elements are added to the element library.
- Once we have the element library, then it makes it much clearer what we mean when way say "Standardise Moodle's HTML, class names, and CSS", irrespective of which framework or theme we are using. This is a huge amount of work, but very important. The way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time, so the frontend team needs to start this soon, and keep going for the foreseeable future. (Poor elephant.)
- It does seem that new frameworks are still springing up, and no-one really knows what is best. If we can avoid fixing one one framework now, then that is better. Still, we have to work on something, and bootstrapbase is that thing at the moment, I suppose. It is useful if other people can try out other frameworks in parallel (as is happening), to prove we really have potential flexibility if we need it.
Overall, this is a really good an interesting discussion, can I join the rest of you in wishing the front-end team lots of luck with this.