Web Starter Kit 0.4.0

We're happy to announce a fresh release of Web Starter Kit 0.4.0 is available today. Thanks to everyone in the community that contributed. The full changelog is available and we'll talk about the major changes below.

Workflow improvements for Sass & CSS

In previous versions, errors you made in your Sass files would cause the serve command to throw an error and exit until you fixed the breaking change. In 0.4, we now output the line number and information about the error but your watch/serve won't break. Instead, it will keep working and take account of your fixed up styles when you've addressed the mistake.

Our Autoprefixer setup is now more centralized, giving you greater control over the browsers you would like to support. By default we've already filled this information out for you based on what we target, but you can customize it as needed.

We've also improved our unused CSS removal to account for all selectors used in the sidebar menu and also ensure that styles are correctly minified cross platform.

Layout improvements

A number of cross-browser layout issues in both Firefox and IE have been addressed in this release.

In 0.4, we've also dropped our use of `min-device-width as the deciding factor for the type of navigation experience you get. Whilst this previously let us target different types of screens, it resulted in a number of inconsistency issues for users with large numbers of menu items.

For narrow viewports, we now consistently fallback to the hamburger menu whether you're on desktop or tablet. As a side effect, this will make it easier to test your responsive layout as you won't need to turn on DevTools Emulation or Firefox Responsive Mode to test your viewports.

Hello Roboto and a fonts task

We now include a checked in version of all Roboto webfonts used in Web Starter Kit and a fonts task for copying over fonts dropped into the app/fonts directory to your dist folder.

Having reviewed the overall complexity of what our previous Google Fonts setup was pulling in from the CDN, we discovered that our target browsers required a much simpler setup. As part of this we decided to locally include a check-in of our fonts with direct references to what you need.

Serve your production builds

A new gulp serve:dist command has been added that uses the dist build process to serve you a production version of your application from the dist directory.

Thanks. Keep filing bugs and even better..pull requests :D

We have some big ambitions for Web Starter Kit over the next 6 months including a move to Google's Material Design Spec, improved simplicity in our build file and more choices for layout. Stay tuned and if you have time, feel free to chip in on a few issues. We could always use the help :)

Web Starter Kit 0.3.1

Changelog: v0.3.0...v0.3.1

Web Starter Kit 0.3.0

This release includes numerous fixes and improvements.

Changelog: v0.2.0-beta...v0.3.0

Web Starter Kit (Beta) 0.2.0

This release contains our first public beta. More information is available on http://developers.google.com/web/starter-kit.