While I was a part of the front-end team of De Persgroep Publishing one of the projects we were assigned to in 2014 was the total revamp for De Morgen.
Both the newspaper and the website got a new look and for the website there were extra challenges as integrating a new paywall model and making it 100% responsive.
Architecture
De Morgen Plus wasn’t our first project with our new architectural setup for front-end projects. The foundation for our setup was based on our experiences with the Volkskrant Plus and HLN Regio projects.
HTML and CSS
The HTML is written in the Java template engine Thymeleaf. This way we, as front-end developers, have more control over the output and we can skip a great part of prototyping in static HTML files.
Our CSS approach is a combination of a modular architecture with Smacss, Sass and BEM
Javascript
“F*$k jQuery” is our motto. Not that we don’t like jQuery, we just think it bloats our codebase because a lot of what it contains we don’t use at all and because of all the custom development we have to do. We use microframeworks like Bonzo and Qwery to handle any cross-browser issues and to simplify the way we write JS. We already have our own custom library which we can use across various projects.
Automation
We initially used Grunt to automate everything (build process, code hinting/linting for JS and Sass) but not long ago we switched to Gulp.
Honors & awards
January 2015 “de Morgen” was elected as “Medium of the year” on the Merit Awards. More info here (Dutch)