Newsfeed-Components

In this project we are going to be building a news feed reader. The goal is to have a collapsing menu, and expandable news articles. The styles and some of the HTML is already done for you.

Need to know

  • Creating DOM elements with Javascript Functions
  • Element selection
  • Basic DOM manipulation
  • Events and event listeners

Set Up The Project With Git

Follow these steps to set up and work on your project:

  • Create a forked copy of this project.
  • Clone your OWN version of the repository (Not Lambda's by mistake!).
  • Create a new branch: git checkout -b <firstName-lastName>.
  • Implement the project on your newly created <firstName-lastName> branch, committing changes regularly.
  • Push commits: git push origin <firstName-lastName>.

Follow these steps for completing your project.

  • Submit a Pull-Request to merge <firstName-lastName> Branch into main (student's Repo). Please don't merge your own pull request

Launching the project

  • Navigate to the root of the project with your command line.
  • Run npm install to download any dependencies listed in the package.json file.
  • Run npm start to compile your project and launch a development server.
  • Navigate Chrome to the URL indicated in the output of the npm start command.

Part 1: The Articles Component

  • Follow the instructions found in the Articles.js file to complete the JavaScript functionality and add the components to the DOM.

Part 2: Add Articles

  • Now that we have our components built, add a few articles of your own to the data array. Notice how our JavaScript code automatically creates the new articles. Write the code once and add as many components as you want all while maintaining the functionality we built!

Part 3: The Menu

  • Follow the instructions found in the Menu.js file to complete the JavaScript functionality.

Stretch Goals

If you complete the main goals of the page let's play around with some cool animation libraries.

A few things to check out:

Native CSS Animations

  • CSS has the ability to animate elements using a number of different properties. Check out transform and transition, and animation. A word of warning, these CSS properties will act differently on different browsers, so always read and see if you need a browser prefix in order to animate properly.
  • https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/a/animation/

jQuery

  • jQuery used to be an extremely popular JavaScript library, in fact most of the native DOM manipulation we know and love, came from the jQuery library. It is worth getting a little familiar with it. The jQuery library is massive, and part of it is an animation library. jQuery gives us a fantastic method called .animate(). There are also simpler methods such as slideDown slideUp, slideToggle, show, hide and more.
  • http://www.jquery.com

GSAP

  • Greensock Animation Platform, is by far the most powerful of the three. It is intuitive and easy to use, and you will be amazed at the results.
  • https://greensock.com/gsap

Note: Just a reminder the stretch goals are just extra practice using the tools we have learned. These are not required. Only parts 1-3 are required portions of the project. If you do not get to the stretch goals, don't worry.

  • Animation Goal #1. Animate the menu opening: You will need to change the CSS for the menu in order to achieve this. Get the menu to slide in from the left side of the screen. And slide out when the button is clicked. Bonus: Get the menu to slide back out when the user clicks anywhere on the screen other than the menu.

  • Animation Goal #2 Animate the article opening. This one is a bit trickier. You will need to change the CSS for this component as well. Animate the component so that it slides open and slides closed on each click. Update the text in the expand button to read 'Click to Expand' or 'Click to Close' depending on the state of the article.

  • Close Button

    Add a close (or 'read') button to each Article component. When clicked the article will disappear.

  • Component Constructor

    Create a function that builds Article components. You are not expected to finish this. This goal is simply an exercise in thinking about how you would implement a function that took some data, created a new Article from it, and appended it to the HTML (without actually writing anything in the HTML file). This is a difficult concept to undertake, but even thinking about how you would implement it will give you a better understanding of how we use frameworks in upcoming sprints.

  • Implement a way to write your own articles using the Component Constructor and some input fields.