launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Julian Edwards <julian.edwards@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday 08 June 2012 15:17:41 Huw Wilkins wrote:
> Hi Launchpad,
> 
> I've been looking at how we can make some changes to our UI, but I'm
> hitting a bit of a problem.
> 
> If we want to do anything significant to our UI we want to do it under a
> feature flag. However, once I use a feature flag I very quickly end up
> having to maintain two sets of HTML and CSS or I end up hacking extra
> layers of code on top of existing HTML/CSS instead of being able to
> write it cleanly from the start.
> 
> This becomes very apparent if we want to re-skin Launchpad were there
> are potentially hundreds of places that would need to be feature
> flagged. That means a lot of duplication and the new skin would be
> written on top of the existing HTML/CSS structure.
> 
> Does anyone have any suggestions about how we could approach this problem?

I don't think there's an easy solution to your problem.

Last time we re-skinned we just froze regular development for a while and 
everyone mucked in to do it quickly as possible before we released the re-
skinned site.  Urgent maintenance fixes were just cowboyed IIRC.