The purpose of this app is to allow User Formats designers to rapidly prototype html layouts that can be linked together and published publicly for user testing.
It exists for the following reasons:
- To make it easier to create structured layouts based on a grid system.
- To avoid the time and code overhead of having to prototype on branches of govuk repos.
- To allow us to easily publish prototypes for testing (using Heroku).
Some caveats:
- You need Rails 4 installed.
- The emphasis is on speed of prototype creation for designers rather than perfect code for developers.
- It's about making quick, throw away layouts that would likely need to be rebuilt semantically for production.
- It uses Rails so requires that locally to be used.
- It hotlinks to the GOV.UK application.css and gov_uk_template.css in production.
- It uses copies of the frontend toolkit and design patterns grids, which may need copying across again if they change significantly.
It's probably not that much use to others, but help yourself if you want to clone :)