Developer Mode to include stylesheet for faster development

[acketon]

Some of the sites that ID builds are Responsive Framework sites without a child theme. We make design, layout, color, typography changes in Custom CSS to apply a light design touch to the core Responsive Framework theme but avoid creating a child theme.

The problem we have is that the workflow when developing that stylesheet is slow and cumbersome. These sites are often built on www-staging and/or on nm.cms-devl and currently our designers have to either work in the Custom CSS editor which is not a great code editor compared to Sublime Text or Coda that they are used to working in. The only other option they have is to work in their editor of choice and copy and paste the entire stylesheet into the Custom CSS editor and then click update/save in the editor, wait for it to save and then reload the page in another tab to see the results.

Here is a recently launched site that is built in this fashion:
http://www.bu.edu/globalhealthtechnologies/

The stylesheet in custom.css is ~1,200 lines
You can see in the CSS revisions how the designer had to save changes every few minutes...each time copying and pasting into the editor as bugs were fixed and styles adjusted.

The solution could be handled in a few ways, one might be to display a URL input field for Designers/Super-Admins that a url to a stylesheet can be pasted and would be enqueued on the site after the main stylesheet but before custom.css. This would happen ONLY while on www-staging or nm.cms-devl. Once the site was switched to production it would not attempt to load that stylesheet and the designer would be responsible for pasting the final styles into Custom.css. This would allow the designer to FTP the stylesheet to a location that they have access such as somewhere on NM or bu.edu/webteam/ so they could more rapidly develop the stylesheet while working in their text editor such as Sublime Text with the SFTP plugin to autoupload on each save of the stylesheet. Then all that is required is a refresh of the site to view the style changes.

[acketon]

While developing this site on NM initially 657 revisions/updates to the stylesheet were made. Many of these were a copy/paste from a code editor.

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