New HTML5 Boilerplate Template Repository

Hey! It’s been a while. Sorry! I’m going to have a lot more content to share over the next few months, so get used to me writing again.

Anyway, we’re in the middle of creating HTML5 Boilerplate 9.0. As part of that release we have created a Github template repository.

As GitHub wrote when they unveiled the feature

Sharing boilerplate code across codebases is a constant pattern in software development. Bootstrapping a new project with our favorite tools and directory structures helps programmers go from idea to “Hello world!” more efficiently and with less manual configuration.

Today, we’re excited to introduce repository templates to make boilerplate code management and distribution a first-class citizen on GitHub. To get started, all you need to do is mark a repository as a template, and you’ll immediately be able to use it to generate new repositories with all of the template repository’s files and folders.

With all the mentions of “boilerplate” it’s like template repos were made for HTML5 Boilerplate. Nice.

Using them is pretty simple.

First, navigate to h5bp/html5-boilerplate-template. Once there, click on the “Use this template”

Next, you add the name you would like to use:

And that’s it. You’ve got a fresh repo with all the files from HTML5 Boilerplate ready to go.

That’s just a taste of the changes on offer. I’ll have more news as we get closer to the final release. I would love to have this release out before 2021 is over. We’ll see!

HTML5 Boilerplate v7.1 Released

Hot on the heels of our last major release, we just released a new minor version of HTML5 Boilerplate, v7.1.0. The biggest changes in this release are an upgraded version of Modernizr (which is on a steady release schedule again) and an update to the Google Analytics snippet/docs.

Here are the full release notes:

  • Update Modernizr to 3.7.1 (#2121)
  • Update Analytics docs and snippet (#2118)
  • Minor docs updates (#2115)
  • Minor devdeps updates (#2114)
  • More succinct way of writing the IE conditional statement (#2113)

Download the latest from github or install it from npm.

HTML5 Boilerplate v7 released

After a few months of starts and stops while I wrestled my SVG book into submission and released main.css as a standalone project, I’m pleased to announce that HTML5 Boilerplate v7 was released on Friday February 8, 2019.

The biggest change is the way that we include the aforementioned main.css. Since it’s now a standalone project we include it as an npm dependency at build-time. This change still allows people (including HTML5 Boilerplate itself) to consume main.css as a whole, but also allows the component styles to be used individually in different, and hopefully interesting, ways. You can access the component styles to mix and match directly through the main.css npm package.

We also dropped support for IE9/10. That was not as cathartic as dropping support for IE6 or IE8, but it was still nice. It feels like we’re living in the future.

The docs also got a big upgrade. We could use more help there, but we’ve done a couple of really good passes at the documentation and I think it’s in a good place now.

Thanks again to Christian Oliff for his work on this release. He’s proven to be an invaluable team member over the past couple of years. I really appreciate his help on tasks and his attention to detail.

And, as always, thanks to our many contributors. You are the best!

Are you interested in helping out? Check out our current issues, submit an idea for a new feature or look at one of the other H5BP projects to see if there’s something else you’re interested in helping with. It’s fun.

Here’s the full release notes:

7.0.0 (February 8, 2019)

  • Drop support for IE9/IE10 (#2074)
  • Move the CSS to a separate repo (#2066)
  • Add theme-color meta tag to index.html (#2074)
  • Add ‘install with yarn’ steps to README (#2063)
  • Improved Webmanifest (#2060)
  • Upgrade Normalize to 8.0.1 (#2104)
  • Update .htaccess (#2110)
  • Remove instances of shrink-to-fit=no (#2103)
  • Removes “display”: “standalone” from manifest (#2096)
  • Big Docs update – Fixed links, removed IE9/IE10 specific info, made touch icons section more concise, add details on security.txt and more tidying up (#2074, #2065, #2062)

Download the latest from github or install it from npm.

HTML5 Boilerplate 6.1.0 Released

The news is coming fast and furious these days. Last week I offered up a big update on my SVG book (which I’m still in the process of finishing) and now I’m pleased to announce that we just released HTML5 Boilerplate 6.1.

In addition to the regular updates to dependencies, etc. the biggest change was moving to eslint for JavaScript linting. That was a lingering change we were unable to get into 6.0 and that change ended up being my biggest personal contribution to this release.

Speaking of contributions, Christian Oliff was instrumental in getting 6.1 out the door. I often woke up to a flurry of PRs as he threw together updates while I was busy sleeping, so he definitely kept this release on track. So, in addition to our ever-expanding cast of contributors, he definitely deserves big-time kudos for this release ????????✌️

Here’s the full release notes:

6.1.0 (May 1, 2018)

HTML5 Boilerplate 6.0 Released

drink

If you’ve been paying attention, you will have noticed that HTML5 Boilerplate 6.0.0 came out a few weeks ago. If not, it did. 6.0.1 has since been released.

It was a long time coming and I’m super happy to have it shipped. It was a lot of fun. Working with a project like this invariably means you have to do new things, so getting a major release out the door (where you have to touch everything) is a fun, educational experience. And, of course, working with the community is also pretty great.

Thanks!

Anyway, it was a big release and featured a lot of nifty stuff including:

  • We finally removed IE8 Support. This was a change that we had been discussing for some time and it was one of the first things I pushed through when I started taking a more active role on the project. Thanks to everyone for their help and input on this one.
  • We finally added a sample web app manifest file. That code had been percolating for years and it finally shipped.
  • We upgraded to Modernizr 3 and added a sample Mondernizr config so that people can do their own custom builds locally. Our Modernizr file is now created at build-time and I reworked the default detects to be more, er, modern.
  • We found out someone unaffiliated with the project had published the project to npm, so we took control of the package (thank you npm– support you were awesome) and published an official npm package.
  • And… lots of other great work by many contributors, including a ton of great work late in the process by Christian Oliff. Thanks to everyone for your contributions.

As a note, we still have an open bug that we’d love to get your input on– macOS – VoiceOver / Chrome announcing visually hidden text out of order · Issue #1985 · h5bp/html5-boilerplate. It’s an Apple bug with accessibility concerns that we’d like to work around.

As for what’s next… I’ll be opening up a couple of new issues for discussion this week, I think. So keep your eyes on the repo and join in on the fun.