Does anyone have a Frontend development/prototyping process/workflow that has proven to be effective and efficient?
I have multiple sites running on Sitecore. We are also MVC based.
As a Frontend developer, we use a Frontend toolkit that is used to Prototype the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This is built using Grunt Server and Node.js. This was built for us by a vendor.
I'm having two issues with this toolkit.
Every time we brand the project, the FE Tool Kit needs to be reinstalled. It can’t be just copied over because the file paths are too long. The install is problematic because the NPM does not consistently get and install the same module versions. So there is often, hours of troubleshooting Grunt server and build errors.
The development workflow is difficult in regards to how we work with the BackEnd developers. Currently, the flow is like this: Front End makes the HTML, CSS, Javascript. Hand off to BackEnd. BackEnd adds in all Sitecore functionality in the project (outside the FE Tool Kit). This is a problem because if the BackEnd developers make an HTML change to a file, it is not reflected back in the FE Tool Kit. Likewise, if a Front End Developer needs to make a simple change, it must be done in the FE Tool Kit then communicated to the BackEnd developer who must then integrate it with the current
.cshtml
files. It’s a clunky process!
Does anyone have a Frontend development/prototyping process/workflow that has proven to be effective and efficient?