In a coupled deployment, Brightspot provides both the back end and the front end. At run time, Brightspot retrieves text and images from the database, and injects those assets into templates. Those populated templates are delivered to the browser along with CSS styling. The combination of templates and styling is called a theme.
Brightspot’s standard edition comes with a comprehensive theme that attractively renders the most popular content types in electronic publishing. You can easily customize the included theme to deliver your site’s individual look and feel. In addition, publishers can extend the theme to render assets with layouts that range from sparse to jazzy.
The process of customizing a theme is a big part of front-end development. To facilitate that development, Brightspot provides Styleguide, a webpack-based application that previews a theme with mock text and images. As you save your source files, Styleguide’s hot reload rebuilds the preview, so you can immediately evaluate any change by reloading the browser page.
The first step in developing with Styleguide is to go through a short beginner’s tutorial. This tutorial takes you through the two-step installation process, bringing up Styleguide in your browser, and exporting the theme into a zip file that admins install into Brightspot.
Styleguide decouples front-end development from back-end development, so front-end developers can independently code templates and style sheets. Because this activity occurs in parallel with back-end development, the time required to deploy an actual site is minimal.
