Web export

[SimonBiggs]

Hi,

I'd be quite keen to undergo the required work to make it so that lexicon is also able to export to a webpage as well.

Might I be able to have access to the current branch where you're doing work internally so that I can investigate the plausibility of achieving this?

Cheers,
Simon

[Kinostrome]

Hi @SimonBiggs. Thanks for your interest.

One of the main purposes of Lexicon is specifically that it is not a web page, but provides a seamless native experience, and focuses solely on that. Please refer to the Background & Motivation for a better understanding of the goals of this project.

This is because Discourse already provides a fully functional mobile website. Their mobile site is what is used in their official DiscourseHub mobile app.

If you just want Discourse's mobile site to look more like Lexicon on mobile, we would encourage you to explore creating a custom Discourse theme.

[SimonBiggs]

Would you recommend I branch off of alpha-v2 or master for our dev work? (eg, if we have fly-by bug fixes that are not related to the web export, which of those branches would most benefit you for them to come to?)

[Kinostrome]

That depends specifically on when and how you're intending to use it.

master won't have many feature changes (and won't include things like push notifications, integration with the upcoming Lexicon Discourse plugin, etc.), but will be true to the experience that's currently presented in the documentation for v1. And, as bugfixes and issues get resolved, it can return to a more stable state with only fixes coming in (rather than new features).

alpha-v2 by nature will be less stable, but will include new features, and eventually will become the active development branch.

If there is a bug fix that would benefit both branches, we would probably end up applying it to both. There are of course some exceptions to that, such as a bugfix that would end up pulling v2 changes into v1 or complicating things in that way. But that gets handled on a case-by-case basis.

[SimonBiggs]

That depends specifically on when and how you're intending to use it.

We're looking for an initial deployment to be pegged in September.

[SimonBiggs]

@Kinostrome, here's an update. I have the application exporting to a statically generated webpage using GitHub pages over here:
https://lexicon.guildofentrepreneurs.com/

The same code base still successfully builds to an app and passes all the mobile tests.

I had to disable icons to begin with when the platform is web. And there is still a few bugs on the web side. But, due to the use of platform flags, there is a potential to be able to create a minimal PR that merges the initial web export prototype if this is something you might be interested in.

Let me know :) (I'll go fix up the other PRs now)

[Kinostrome]

Nice, that looks cool. There does appear to already be a bug related to the animation with the search bar header by the way.

For now, we'd prefer the team focus on the upcoming beta release, so it is best maintained on a fork. Since, as you're saying, it's a small set of changes, keeping the fork in sync with the changes here doesn't sound like it would be too much of an issue.