Announcing TWBS LESS: Simple LESS Support for Drupal 7

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kpyan8s's picture

Introducing LESS support in Drupal 7 would be a great idea when combine with Bootstrap and Font Awesome. A helper module named "TWBS LESS". The goal of TWBS LESS is to provide a handy support for LESS and act as the helper module for on going Drupal-Bootstrap-Remix development.

Below information is quoted from Edison Wong's blog post.

Key Features

  • Provide drush make file for library download
  • Confirm library successfully initialized with hook_requirements()
  • Support both LTR *.less and RTL *-rtl.less, as like as that of locale_css_alter() supported
  • If Drupal's CSS aggregation enabled, all .less will automatically compile at server-side by lessphp as .css before Drupal CSS aggregation
  • If Drupal's CSS aggregation disabled, all .less will link with rel set to "stylesheel/less" individually, so less.js will handle with client-side compile
  • Support FireLESS for .less debug with Firebug in client-side compile mode

Live Demo

TWBS LESS is now integrated into DruStack distribution, so you can try it in a live sandbox with simplytest.me.

Why Another LESS Module?

For general and generic LESS support you should consider another LESS CSS Preprocessor module which started since 2010-03-04.

On the other hand you should consider about using this module because of:

  • Purely design for assist TWBS, which means you will have the best compatibility when using both together
  • Support both server-side pre-compile / client-side live-compile with debug mode enable; LESS CSS Preprocessor only support server-side pre-compile
  • RTL support with *-rtl.less just as simple as CSS *-rtl.css that Drupal core supported; LESS CSS Preprocessor require it to be named as "somename.css.less" style
  • Server-side pre-compile CSS as naming based on its original .less md5_file() result, which means even you add a single space the cache file will also be regenerate; LESS CSS Preprocessor calculate based on filemtime()
  • Much simple implementation which handle all LESS support automatically as like as that of Drupal core CSS support; LESS CSS Preprocessor coming with 3.5x times as compare in final downloadable archive size

Please feel free to test it out and comment with your idea. Let's enjoy simplified theme development with LESS ;-)