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Development

We develop our front-end code in the assets/ directory which allows us to have a development directory that would be built to be production ready and put inside the static/ and resources/ directories (which are the directories Hugo looks into for front-end files) using Webpack and Hugo’s own resource pipelines. To start the build process for development run the following commands:

make dep
make dev # Or make build for production build

Prerequisites: node and yarn need to be installed on your system.

Styles

Syna is using Bootstrap v4.1 with a customized set of colors. You can change these colors by editing them in config.toml. Change other Bootstrap variables using assets/styles/bootstrap/_variables.scss. Syna customizes some parts of the theme via custom css, which is available in the assets/styles directory.

Fonts

FontAwesome Free is supported by default and is used throughout built-in fragments. You can disable it by setting fontawesome.disabled in your config.toml to true.

If you want to add FontAwesome Pro to the theme, the following recipe may be helpful.

  • Move all the files from fontawesome-pro-[version]-web/webfonts/ (from the archive) to static/fonts1 directory.
  • Move all the files from fontawesome-pro-[version]-web/scss/ (from the archive) to assets/styles/fontawesome1 directory.
  • Set fontawesome.pro in your config.toml file to true.

After these steps, FontAwesome Pro will be loaded in every page of your website.

JavaScript

Syna uses code spliting to get bundles for each fragment. This allows us to have lighter pages in most cases. Within the assets/js/ directory there is an index.js file that is the main script, which is necessary on all pages. Every other script is needed by the fragment of the same name. For example hero.js is needed by the hero fragment.

If you want to add an extra script for a specific fragment, you need to add that script as an entry point in the webpack configuration file. Then import that script inside the fragment (using the script tag).

Transpiled and bundled JS files are located inside assets/scripts/ directory and are generated using Webpack.

React support

Syna has built-in support for React. We use React portal API inside the react-portal fragment. This allows us to render an empty container that is able to render components inside it.
To use this feature you can add a new react-portal to your page, write your component and expose it inside the window.synaPortals object.

import * as React from 'react';

class Hello extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <h1>Hello World</h1>
    );
  }
}

(window.synaPortals || (window.synaPortals = {})).hello = {
  component: Hello,
  container: '#hello [data-portal]',
};

The #hello [data-portal] is where your component renders. [data-portal] is a div tag inside your react-portal fragment and hello in this example, is the fragment’s filename.

Keep in mind that JSX is not supported by browsers. Please checkout our example Webpack config and the required dependencies and commands.


  1. Note that the mentioned directory in your website’s root directory. If the directory doesn’t exist, create it in that path. ↩︎