what’s new with grommet 2?
First, let’s talk about the team and some of the changes we’ve made to the better grommet and its community. Over the past year, our team, it's focused, and the community has expanded…
To talk about the last year, we have to go back, way back, to three years ago; grommet started as the passion project of four people inside of Hewlett Packard Enterprise that has grown to be the de-facto UI framework for the company and helped spawn a design organization within the company. In parallel, a passionate open source community has embraced grommet. With those two tracks, we’ve decided to separate the company from the framework. As a company, many of the products we sell depend on grommet, and we wanted to make that a reality for other companies and people to do the same.
As for the team, the core group of @ericsoderberg, @alansouzati, @jacquot, and I are still kickin’ it but we’ll be expanding the team to include some new faces to better support the community. Welcome, @shimi, @oorestisime, and @jens!
About a year ago, the core team started gathering a bunch of ideas and improvements that we thought would be useful in further developing grommet to be easier to use for us and the community. If you’ve been following along for the past couple of months, those ideas turned into something that evolves our UI framework to something more… It’s been a crazy year for grommet.
So, what did we make? All this talk…
A more modular grommet
Grommet components are now more capable and more bite-sized. Whether it’s consistent sizing, variable fonts, and spacing, to way components fit in different view contexts, or new ways to stack it all together — everything fits together better. We wanted to take what worked we in version one, like “T-Shirt” sizing and make it a core aspect of how users can carve out templates and their apps. This meant making our component properties more consistent and powerful and intuitive, while at the same time giving a better baseline to build out.
With the switch to being more modular came a rethink of what a component meant to us. This is why grommet 2 is all about keeping the component library simple so everyone can mix, match, and tailor grommet to their needs. We knew coming out the gate this would get some pushback, but as you can see in the community today like our CodeSandbox “Starters” are starting to change that.
Expanded theme support
Style more, more, and more. With grommet 2 many of the components have been extended to allow overrides of the base styling and better theme support of colors, fonts, and brand sensitivities. This combined with a more approachable base theme allows folks to come in with their brand and make grommet their own.
But that’s not all
This is just the tip of the iceberg. As we continue to build on grommet 2 we’ll delve into more details in future posts, stay tuned (and let us know what you want to hear about) for some of these topics…
· Build your own UI Library
· Everything Responsive
· Atomic Design Templates
· Same Great Accessibility Support
· More layout options (Grid and Box)
· Grommet Animation Library
· Simplified Charting and Visualizations
Our goal with grommet 2 was to make grommet “more” in every way…We really wanted developers to feel enabled and have more control over all the things. Working with the community, the biggest feedback we received was customization, flexibility, and more of everything! For us, building a platform that could support those ideas meant taking a new approach to how grommet was built from the bottom up! With that meant keeping what our community loved from the original version of grommet and rethinking what we wanted grommet to be in the future. This wasn’t an easy transition, and our community was instrumental in helping grommet 2 come to become what is today.
Not to name drop, but we wouldn’t be here without the feedback from folks like @atanas, @robertgary2, and @sri for pushing us throughout the alpha and beta process, without these folk’s grommet 2 wouldn’t be what it is today.
