Release notes
Alpha 1 represents the beginning of the end for the exploration of how the VF 2.0 should be built to achieve its aims.
What is the VF 2.0?
A modular, compatible framework for life science websites and services. Need to know more? Read this
What's in the alpha?
As the first alpha has massive amounts of change, we won't present a detailed changelog, but rather some high level notes on where we are and what got us here.
This is our first alpha and captures the first step on a road ... we still have much to do everywhere ranging from patterns, documentation, guides, technical tooling, governance and so on.
- Initial conceptual planning of the VF 2.0 began in summer 2017 and we starting writing code in July 2018.
- In November 2018 we moved from the EMBL GitLab server to GitHub for better technical integration and collaboration
- Outreach remains a priority (there's the issue queue on GitHub and Slack)
- Visual Framework 2.0 patterns are now available as standalone npm packages
- The pattern library is online
- We have a very developer-oriented README.md available
- We've switched the default font from IBM Plex Mono to Sans
- Tools for spacing and the default look of things is much better
- Responsive design is back
- The look of the VF is very "EMBL" out of the box, this will change over time as the VF is separate from any one brand
- We're still working on a quick start to building sites with the VF (but there are boilerplate pages available)
- We're working on a guide for integrating VF 2.0 patterns in your code base -- as either a ground-up nw framework built with VF patterns, or integrating just one or two patterns from the VF
What's next?
- A lot of documentation, howtos, and outreach
- More patterns
- Optimisations
- EMBL.org specific tooling
- Divide the vf-core look from vf-embl
- See the Alpha 2 roadmap