I think there are some tech decisions here that we should look at as part of the inception phase. The way we approach this will affect any later decisions about updating the whole admin UI, which involves:
- a) moving to a new CSS framework for the admin UI
- b) replacing our existing Angular code with React
So even though this Product Uplift project is a small and isolated piece, it’s really the template for a much wider set of changes that have a large scope and impact.
The React part is pretty well decided, and I think we can easily slot in some nice React components into the existing structure for this new page.
The CSS framework is the bit that I think needs looking at here, and the decision will have consequences for years to come.
To quote @Mario from the admin UI discussion:
I’m personally a fan of using frameworks over reinventing the wheel
I had a play around with switching CSS framework in the admin UI a couple of weeks ago, and essentially if we choose a nice framework that already includes styling for a wide range of UI components, we can have:
- very clean views, with a lot less custom classes and layout hacks
- almost no CSS to maintain (the framework itself will do the styling)
- the ability for non-FE devs to make beautiful UIs with minimal effort
If we make good choices here we can radically reduce the amount of dev work required in the short-mid term and the amount of code we will need to maintain in the long term.