SF Chronicle News App Template

What is it?

This template for grunt-init contains all the setup required to start building a flat-file news application (It may be useful for dynamic apps as well). The goal is to have a set of sensible defaults and automatic tasks similar to those provided by Tarbell, but optimized for a NodeJS workflow. Among other things, app built on this scaffolding will automatically parse CSV and JSON for your HTML templates, import data from Google Drive, build LESS into CSS, browserify JavaScript from CommonJS modules, and set up a local development server with watch tasks and live reload to make rapid development easy as pie.

Executive summary: Provides everything you need to start building a news app for the SF Chronicle.

Installation

Clone this repo into your .grunt-init/ folder using the following command:

git clone git@github.com:sfchronicle/newsapp-template ~/.grunt-init/newsapp

That's it! Now let's start a sample project to see how it all works.

Getting Started

For our first project, we'll do something pretty simple. Make a new folder for your project, open a shell there, and type:

grunt-init newsapp

The scaffolding wizard will ask you to fill in some information, such as your name, the name of the project, a description. Once that's done, it'll set up some folders and source files for you, and install the NPM modules needed for this project. After it hands you back to the prompt, type grunt at the command line to compile the project and start a local development server at http://localhost:8000.

This is all well and good, but the page itself isn't very exciting at the start, because there's nothing in it. There are three default files that are created for you to start your project:

/src/index.html - The primary HTML file for the project
/src/js/main.js - The entry point for all JavaScript on the page
/src/css/seed.less - The bootstrap file for LESS compilation into CSS

If you open up src/index.html, and edit it while Grunt is running, the watch task will see your changes and re-run the relevant task. Likewise, editing seed.less (or any other LESS file in the src/css directory) will cause the LESS compiler to recompile your CSS, and editing any JavaScript files in the src/js file will cause the browserify to rebuild /build/app.js based on your dependencies from src/js/main.js. These changes are baked out into the build folder for publishing, but also served up via the local development server on port 8000.

Cloning an existing repo

Navigate to a directory in which you want the new folder and type:

git clone https://github.com/sfchronicle/quiz-template.git

Then type: npm install

Data and Templating

The index.html template (and any other templates you choose to add to the project) are processed using Grunt's built-in Lo-dash templating (HTML files starting with an _ will be ignored). If you have any CSV files located in your data directory, these will be parsed and made available to your templates via the csv object (likewise, JSON files in the data directory will be loaded to the json object, keyed by their filename). For example, maybe you have a CSV file located at data/ceoData.csv containing columns of data named "company", "name", "age", "gender", and "salary". We could write the following template in our index.html file to output this as an HTML table:

<table>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th>Name
      <th>Company
      <th>Salary
  <tbody>
    <% csv.ceoData.forEach(function(ceo) { %>
    <tr>
      <td><%= ceo.name %>
      <td><%= ceo.company %>
      <td><%= t.formatMoney(ceo.salary) %>
    <% }); %>
</table>

In addition to on-disk data, you can set the template to import data from Google Sheets. This is a great option for collaborating with other newsroom staff, who may find Google Drive easier than Excel (especially when it comes to sharing files). You'll also need to run grunt google-auth to create a local OAuth token before you can talk to the API.

You can do this by adding the sheets by their IDs: open the project.json file and add your workbook key to the sheets array found there. Once the workbook key is set and you're authenticated, running grunt sheets will download the data from Google and cache it as JSON (one file per worksheet). As with CSV, the data will be stored as an array unless one of your columns is named "key," in which case it'll be stored as a hash table.

When placing data into your HTML via Lo-dash, there are some helper functions that are also made available via t, as seen above with t.formatMoney(). These are defined in tasks/build.js, but you should feel free to add your own. One that may prove useful is t.include(), which will import another file into the template for processing. For example, we might import a header and footer with the following template:

<%= t.include("partials/_head.html") %>
This space intentionally left blank.
<%= t.include("partials/_foot.html") %>

If you need to pull in article text, you can do so easily by placing a Markdown file with a .md extension in the project folder. These files will be treated as an EJS-like template the same as HTML, so you can mix in data and generate code inline. However, rather than embedding HTML templates into your content, we strongly recommend using ArchieML to load text and data chunks into your regular HTML templates. Any file with a .txt extension in the data folder will be exposed as archieml.{filename}. You can still use Markdown syntax in ArchieML files by using the t.renderMarkdown() function in your templates to process content:

<main class="article">
  <%= t.renderMarkdown(archieml.story.intro) %>
</main>

The template also includes a task (docs) for downloading Google Docs, much the same way as Sheets, and they'll be cached as .docs.txt in the data folder, and then loaded as ArchieML.

Access to Docs requires your machine to have a Google OAuth token, which is largely the same as described in this post. You can obtain a token by running grunt google-auth.

Client-side Code

Let's install Leaflet and add it to our JavaScript bundle. From the project folder, run the following command:

npm install leaflet --save

Now we'll change src/js/main.js to load Leaflet:

var L = require("leaflet"); //load Leaflet from an NPM module
console.log(L);

When we restart our dev server by running the grunt command, the bundle task will scan the dependencies it finds, starting in src/js/main.js, and build those into a single file at build/app.js (which is already included in the default HTML template).

The template also includes a number of smaller helper modules that we didn't think were important enough to publish to NPM. You can always load these modules with the relative path:

//this enables social widgets and ad code
//no return value is needed
require("./lib/social");

Typically, you shouldn't need to load jQuery on a project, because these micro-modules cover most of its functionality, as well as some additional useful tools:

closest.js - Equivalent of jQuery.closest()
debounce.js - Equivalent of Underscore's debounce()
dot.js - Compile client-side EJS templates with the same syntax used by the build system
prefixed.js - Used to access prefixed features in other browsers (mostly used by other modules)
qsa.js - Equivalent to jQuery's DOM search functions

Browserify plugins for loading text files (with extensions .txt and .html) and LESS files (for creating web components) are included with the template, so you can also just require() those files the same way you would other local modules. We often use this for our client-side templating:

//load the templating library preset
var dot = require("./lib/dot");

//get the template source and compile it
var template = dot.compile( require("./_tmpl.html") );

In a similar fashion, to add more CSS to our project, we would create a new LESS file in src/css, then update our src/css/seed.less file to import it like so:

@import "variables"; //import src/css/variables.less
@import "base"; //import src/css/base.less
@import "project"; //import src/css/project.less

From this point, we can continue adding new HTML templates, new JavaScript files, and new LESS imports, just by following these conventions. Our page will be regenerated as we make changes as long as the default Grunt task is running, and the built-in live reload server will even refresh the page for us!

Note that both the LESS and JS bundle tasks are designed to be easily extensible: if you need to output multiple bundles for separate pages (such as a primary page and a secondary embedded widget), you can add new seeds to these files relatively easily, and then share code between both bundles.

What else does it do?

The default Grunt task built into the template will run all the build processes, start the dev server, and set up watches for the various source files. Of course, you can also run these as individual tasks, including some tasks that do not run as a part of the normal build. Remember that you can use grunt --help to list all tasks included in the project.

archieml - Load text files onto grunt.data.archieml
bundle - Compile JS into the app.js file
clean - Delete the build folder to start again from scratch
connect - Start the dev server
copy - Copy all assets over to the build folder
csv - Load CSV files onto grunt.data.csv
docs - Download Google Docs and save as .txt
google-auth - Authorize against the Drive API for downloading private files from Google, such as Docs and Sheets files.
json - Load JSON files onto grunt.data.json
less - Compile LESS files into CSS
markdown - Load Markdown files onto grunt.data.markdown
sheets - Download data from Google Sheets and save as JSON files
static - Run all generation tasks, but do not start the watches or dev server
template - Load data files and process HTML templates
watch - Watch various directories and perform partial builds when they change

Where does everything go?

├── build - generated, not checked in or included before the first build
│   ├── assets
│   ├── app.js
│   ├── index.html
│   └── style.css
├── data - folder for all JSON/CSV/ArchieML data files
├── Gruntfile.js
├── package.json - Node dependencies and metadata
├── project.json - various project configuration
├── src
│   ├── assets - files will be automatically copied to /build/assets
│   ├── css - LESS files
│   ├── index.html
│   ├── partials - directory containing boilerplate template sections
│   └── js
│       ├── main.js
│       └── lib - directory for useful micro-modules
└── tasks - All Grunt tasks

How do I extend the template?

The interactive template is just a starting place for projects, and should not be seen as a complete end-to-end solution. As you work on a project, you may need to extend it with tasks to do specialized build steps, copy extra files, or load network resources. Here are a few tips on how to go about extending the scaffolding on a per-project basis:

Any .js files located in tasks will be loaded automatically by Grunt. Try to keep new tasks relatively self-contained, instead of ending up with a sprawling Gruntfile. Each task can add its own config to the overall configuration with grunt.config.merge, as the existing tasks do.
As with Tarbell, CSV files can be loaded in one of two ways. By default, they will use the columns as the keys, and appear to the HTML template as an array of objects. However, if one of your columns is named "key", the result will be an object mapping the key value to the row data. This is useful for localization, among other purposes.
The setup process will install the ShellJS module in your project, which is used by several of the built-in tasks for file management and setup. In addition to UNIX file operations like cp and mv, ShellJS also provides cross-platform implementations of sed, grep, and ln, as well as easy access to environment variables. Using ShellJS means you don't have to resort to Bash scripting for basic make-like tasks.

Technicalities

This template is licensed under the MIT License, so you are free to do whatever you want with it. If you update or improve the Grunt tasks contained inside, we'd love to hear from you.

By default, the projects generated by this template are licensed under the GPLv3, and we whole-heartedly recommend its usage. However, given that the template itself is MIT-licensed, you are free to replace root/license.txt with the legal text of your choice, or remove it entirely.