Make AT work with Sassy/prepro Module

Well, as it stands Sassy will not work with this theme, so we will need to make some modifications to force the theme to work with the module.

Let me go over what the main issues are and how we might solve these:

1. AT makes extensive use of drupal_add_css() and makes hard coded assumptions about what those files extensions are, i.e. that they are .css files.

2. AT makes hard coded (and rather difficult to change) assumptions about where those files reside, aka they must be in certain directorys.

There are a lot of issues at play here in AT because of the complexity of the CSS subsystem, however my gut reaction is this can work with some savvy re factoring. This could include the following:

- use glob() to scan directories for .scss/.sass files
- a theme setting to switch the default path for CSS files, aka tell AT to load files from the /sass/ directory instead of the /css/ directory
- tell AT to compile its aggregated responsive css styles from the prepro public directory
- stuff like the above, not a complete list, you get the gist...

On a very basic level you can use Sassy to load at least two stylesheets by changing the declarations in your sub-themes info file, aka use this:

However that is far from the whole story in AT and we need some re-factoring of load.inc and other functions to make this work properly. We need to be aware of performance, glob() looks quite slow and we don't want to be using that in a production environment, but in development it will be fine - initial testing appears to be pretty quick and Sassy is working just fine.

Initially however I tend to think glob() (or similar approach) will not be needed and we can simply use the theme setting approach to switch directories, and the above mentioned edit to your info file.

OK, spent the past couple of hours working through this and doing various tests - upshot is this is hard to achieve but not impossible, just hard, which is never a reason not to do something... however that said because it is hard (takes a long time, lots of code and testing) I am going to postpone this and gauge public interest first.

I am making a new release of AT Core today, so this will not be included nor any specific support this Sassy/Prepro.

So, tell me how much you want this people and I will listen, but without public support I am rather on the fence whether to introduce the additional complexity and support requirements.

Hi, just wanted to put in my 2-cents worth. I started earlier this year with Sassy/Prepro. It was great to be able to use SASS without having to add Ruby to the the server environment. However, as I have learned more SASS, and after several months of Sassy running on a few of my websites, I wouldn't encourage it's use. I've experienced huge performance issues while running Sassy/Prepro on my websites, and tons of errors clogging the watchdog log. More than one error in the php-sassy processor have whitescreened my sites on more than one occasion during updates.

Bottom line - Sassy/Prepro is nice for testing, playing, and getting your feet wet on a development site. But I would not at all recommend Sassy/Prepro in a production environment. Yes, the need to install Ruby for SASS is a bit of a tall first step, bit there are other, better ways (such as desktop compilers) http://mhs.github.com/scout-app/ http://compass.handlino.com/) that - if someone is serious about learning SASS, they will put in some effort and learn SASS the right way, Sassy/Prepro is just an accident waiting to happen to a production site, and I would not want to see Sassy compatibility in AdaptiveTheme.

Lastly - you can use Sassy and compile it as Jeff said by adding it in the theme.info file stylesheets[screen][] = sass/global.styles.scss, so in that way, all themes support Sassy on a basic level. Sorry for the bit of a rant, I'm just not keen on Sassy/Prepro after using it for the past few months, so much so that I've disabled it and I just compile the SASS stlyesheets by hand whenever I need to update the sass/css now on those particular sites.

--Tony