🎉 Hoverboard v2.0.0 released today!
Today we’re happy to announce that Hoverboard v2 was merged to master!
⚡️Live demo • 👩💻 GitHub • 🚀 Getting started
👀 What’s this?
Project Hoverboard is a conference website template, that helps you set up mobile first conference website with ready to use features like blog, speakers and schedule management in a few minutes.
The template is created based on 7 years of GDG Lviv experience of running conferences, as well as feedback from more than 500 event organizers from all around the world, who were using the previous Hoverboard versions.
Our goal is to allow event organizers to set up professional conference website with minimum resources.
To get started, you need only basic knowledge of web technologies and a free Firebase account.
🕰 Brief history
In early 2013, during the preparation of GDG DevFest Ukraine, we’ve built some kind of website template using Bootstrap, Django Framework and Google AppEngine.
We decided to open source it, so fellow GDGs around the world can reuse it. People liked the idea of the template, it’s design and functionality, but it was extremely hard to update content and graphics.
Next year, keeping in mind our lessons learned, we started a new project. Focused on one idea to make it more powerful and easier to set up, Project Zeppelin was born.
What was improved:
- Easy to setup (Jekyll and GitHub Pages)
- Simple and responsive design (Bootstrap)
- Integrated speakers and sessions management (via YAML files)
- SEO friendly
Shortly after that, Project Zeppelin-Grunt was released, bringing multilingual support, smaller and more optimized build to make the original project even faster.
In 2015 Polymer 0.5 was released, and we as true geeks, started experimenting with new technologies and APIs. It was the first attempt to make the website work offline (we all know that Wi-Fi always sucks at the conferences), using ServiceWorker. As it always happens with experiments, once we configured the cache to “aggressively” and had to ask attendees to do a hard refresh 🤷.
In the following year, we rebuilt the template one more time as Polymer v1 was released with completely new APIs, and we decided to update the design to follow the latest trends.
Some of the notable features of the v1:
- Polymer v1
- PRPL pattern
- Offline access
- Firebase Realtime DB
- Integrated speakers and sessions management
- Material design with animations
- Custom theme colors
- Quick deploy (with Travis CI)
- Personal schedule and sessions rating
This project worked for the community for the last two years. But, as is usual for Front-End world, where every day you get updates of your dependencies, we have been a little bit behind the trends. We needed something new, and with the release of Polymer v2 we started our project from scratch… again..
🎁 What’s new?
The most exciting new feature — we got a logo! ❤️
Ok, kidding. Hoverdboard v2 is all about the speed, updating to the modern technologies and features to build the unique conference brand. The shortlist:
- Polymer 2
- Redux
- New Design
- Firestore as a DB
- Firebase Cloud Functions
- Push Notifications
- Authentication with multiple providers
- Social Media Preview
- Lazy loading
- Powerful custom theming engine
In total we’ve got 225 commits, 325 files changed, 67,806 lines added and 12,003 removed from @ozasadnyy, @sophieH29, @emedvedev, @MrCsabaToth, @h4rdmol, @maxMarta, @davinkevin, @ilaborie, @unreadableusername and others. Here’s the result:
View the list of highlighted changes on GitHub.
Read 🚀 Getting started docs and start promoting your conference now!
💅 Adjust template to your own style
It’s crucial for conferences to create the individual style — to reflect your identity, ideas and what you believe in. In the current release, you can easily adapt template color scheme to the conference needs.
Additionally, you can update hero block texts, font color, background image or color, and add your own content.
Read the docs for more details.
View GDG DevFest Ukraine 2018 website for the inspiration:
P.S. This is the conference you don’t want to miss! GDG DevFest Ukraine — the biggest community-driven, conference in Central and Eastern Europe, focused on learning Google’s technologies.
Conference will take place in Lviv, on October 12–13th. We expect over 1000 engineers, managers, and entrepreneurs, who will come together to learn and share the experience about Android, Web and Cloud technologies in the phenomenal atmosphere.
🛸 What’s next?
As you probably already know Polymer v3 was released at Google I/O 2018. It’s awesome, packed with shiny ES6 Modules and npm support for components to make it easier to use it (and it’s elements) with other popular libraries, frameworks and tools.
We as true geeks started experimenting, playing with new features and… decided NOT to upgrade, at least for the next six month. Instead, we will be working on the stability and new features for the current version.
If you want to challenge yourself and move forward to the Hoverboard v3, we’re waiting for your Pull Request ❤️.
🙇 Thank you 🙇
All of our users, maintainers, early adopters, backers, feature and bug reporters. Thank you for all contributions that made Hoverboard v2 happen.
Special thanks goes to Sofia Huts for all the sleepless nights and input to the project!
No time to help contribute? Want to give back in other ways? Become a Hoverboard Backer by donating to our open collective. Open Collective helps to support the Core Team, and shows that we are investing our free time for a good cause! ❤️
