jescalan/roots

a toolkit for rapid advanced front-end development

Jeff Escalante

@jescalan

would need to be done through an extension

if you are running speed optimizations though, thats probably a pretty far down the list optimization tbh

running extra optimization on images and javascript come way before this

picture element with webp source, srcset and sizes are first priority

the js bundle trimming and aggressive splitting for http/2 load

if you get there and its still slow, inlining css is probably not going to fix the issue haha

loading css typically is extremely fast

David Eglin

@djeglin

Its not slow... Just for my own personal pleasure forcing Google PageSpeed to give me a good mark :) Real-world speed is lightning fast.

Also, everything else within my control is pretty well optimised already... this is the last thing I'm looking at

If its not easily achievable, its not a problem. I was just curious :)

Jeff Escalante

@jescalan

Haha fair enough! Yea it's achieveable, you'd just need to write a plugin for it

Eleazar Junsan

@eljun

Hi @jescalan,

We been using roots here at (webriq) for all our projects for quite some time now and I been in task to test the new version. I got some concerns, because I'm running in windows 10 - 32bit operating system and it is really slow it took about 7-9 secs to compile the starter template while in the roots its 1-2 secs. Is this something that can be improve in the future? or is there any lacking configuration that needs to be done in order to gain more speed in working in our projects?

Thanks,
Jun

Jeff Escalante

@jescalan

Hey @eljun, so roots is no longer actively maintained, so unfortunately the answer here is no. However if you are still tied to it and want to check it out and make a PR to try to fix it, I would happily review! In case you haven't seen it yet, roots' successor is spike - same functionality, faster, cleaner, and better.

Eleazar Junsan

@eljun

Hello @jescalan,

Perhaps I haven't made my comment more clearer sorry for that, yes we understand that roots is no longer actively maintain though we don't have any high level concerns while we are using it. We've heard about spike since you first announce it, but we had been hesitant to migrate all our projects since then.

So I have been task to test out the new spike (successor of roots) for our future projects. The first concern I have found is when I am compiling spike under Windows 10 32bit Operating system it took it 7-9 secs to compile whenever I change something in the layout whereas in the old roots a simple project can only take less than 2 secs to refresh the page.

Pardon for my english. Thanks for your wonderful work.

Jeff Escalante

@jescalan

ah yeah i have seen some cases when it can be slow on windows for some reason

unfortunately there are very few people using spike that use windows and not one of them has contributed to improve this

Eleazar Junsan

@eljun

Ah okey, thanks Jeff we are planning to have some hardware upgrade soon so I believe that would sort out the issue. Hoping that you will add some more important plugins for spike specially use for blogs.

Jeff Escalante

@jescalan

you mean for reading markdown files?

we have built a number of blogs with spike

this plugin does markdown file parsing

https://github.com/static-dev/spike-collections

however, we very strongly advise against storing content in markdown files, for many reasons

using a database (headless cms) is always a better option

there are adapters for a couple popular headless cms' for spike, such as contentful, dato, and wordpress

Eleazar Junsan

@eljun

HellO @jescalan,

Yes I think I understand where you're going at, we been storing plenty of .md files for our blog using the /admin combined with netlify. So far it is manageable, but we are limited to many blogging features such as tagging, feeds, categorize, searching, and so on. I guess this is one of the major disadvantage of roots compare to Hexo & Jekyll. But we have had no regrets in choosing roots to back our cms sites for the past 2 yrs.

Jeff Escalante

@jescalan

this is a blog made with spike: https://life.spartan.com/

full featured, search, categories, etc

this site uses contentful as the back end

it can be done, just depends on the architecture

markdown files are just a bad way to store blog content

a much better way is a relational database

Wasim Ullah

@mrwullah

How do I display post excerpts of posts on the home page? (as seen on: https://themes.gohugo.io/theme/hugo-theme-cactus-plus/)
What's the code for tags page? (as seen on: https://themes.gohugo.io/theme/hugo-theme-cactus-plus/tags)
How to add "about" under a post? (as seen on: https://addyosmani.com/blog/chrome-devtools-deepdive/)

Jeff Escalante

@jescalan

Hi @mrwullah - are you working on an existing site or building a new site with roots?

are you aware that roots is unmaintained?

Wasim Ullah

@mrwullah

I wasn't aware. I am working with Hugo. Is this the wrong place to ask this question?

Jeff Escalante

@jescalan

yes, this is not the correct room for hugo

this is for roots

not sure how that even got confused haha

andrewgrano

@andrewgrano

haha thats funny

andrewgrano

@andrewgrano

Hey Jeff, hope all is well with you. That Spartan site is really impressive, did you build it? My roots site (roaminglove.com) is going on 300+ posts now. My code is getting messy and the site is getting slower now that there are 4 URLs of JSON data (wordpress creates a new URL after every 100 posts). Do you think it would be pretty time consuming to switch my site from roots to spike and make it as legit as the Spartan site? I guess my other option would be to switch to wordpress as the front-end. Anyways, thank you for any insight that you could provide!

Jeff Escalante

@jescalan

Hey Andrew! Yep I did. I think it would be a lot to time consuming for sure, but as you grow the post number it will become impossible to keep it fast while compiling everything. Switching to Hugo will give you some breathing room, and you could still use spike or roots for your assets, but eventually it will get slow as well

The big move is switching from compiling every post, to only compiling a limited number of recent posts, and fetching the rest on demand. This can be done with either build system, but is involved

Switching to straight word press would also solve the problem, but would make the site load slower and be more vulnerable to security issues

andrewgrano

@andrewgrano

Hey Jeff! Thanks for the feedback. This all makes a lot of sense. My site is growing rapidly (new posts every day), so for that reason, I'm leaning towards using wordpress as the front end... Anyways, congrats on the Spartan website - truly a huge accomplishment!