Carbon for IBM.com Web Components HTML Template

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Getting Started
• Creating new pages
  • Page Language / i18n Support
• SASS compilation and carbon-components
• Right-to-Left (RTL)
• Things to Note
  • Digital Data Object
  • Meta Tags and Analytics
• Upgrading from the Template

Overview

This is an HTML Template utilizing Carbon for IBM.com Web Components. It contains a basic WebPack setup using Handlebars for page management, which includes the dds-dotcom-shell, along with other various patterns and components available in Carbon for IBM.com.

Getting Started

Get the code by clicking Use this template, or clone this repo using git:

git clone https://github.com/carbon-design-system/carbon-for-ibm-dotcom-web-components-template.git

Once cloned, go to the project directory to install dependencies and build the project

$ yarn && yarn build

In order to enable features like Right-to-Left (RTL), you will have to set environment variables in a .env file. Please see .env.example.

ALTLANG_ROOT_PATH=<Sets the root path for language alternative urls, default is '/' >
LANG_DEFAULT=<Sets the default language, default is 'en-us'>

Then start the application:

$ yarn start

To export to a static site, run the following:

$ yarn build

Then the contents of the dist folder can be uploaded to your production environment.

Creating new pages

This repo contains an example page that can be easily modified and expanded upon. In order to get started, navigate to src/pages/home/home.hbs and you can start editing the Handlebars template as you would regular HTML.

If you'd like to create more pages, you're welcome to copy the example directory into one of your own. However, you'll have to edit the file in src/pages.js to include this new page. Note the translationKey, which is the string responsible to fetch the translated values to be used in the page -- more on that later.

const pages = [
  // other pages
  {
    output: './example/index.html',
    content: {
      title: 'Example page',
      description: 'An example page',
    },
    chunks: ['example'],
    chunkEntry: {
      'example': './src/pages/example/example.js',
    },
    template: './src/pages/example/example.hbs',
    translationKey: 'example'
  },
]

Page Language / i18n Support

This template handles page language functionality, where the available language template strings are defined in src/locales/[language-locale]/*.json, where the name of each json file is the corresponding page translation key.

For example, the homepage for en-us would live under /src/locales/en-us/home.json with the following content:

{
  "leadspace_title": "Lead space title",
  "leadspace_copy": "Use this area for a short line of copy to support the title",
  "content_block_mixed_heading": "Content Block - Mixed Groups",
  "content_block_segmented_heading": "Content Block - Segmented",
  "content_block_simple_heading": "Content Block - Simple",
  "content_block_media_heading": "Content Block - With Media"
}

To create additional languages, create a new folder for the language/locale, then generate the corresponding page data.

For example, creating a corresponding home page data for fr-ca, the file /src/locales/fr-ca/home.json would be created with the following content:

{
  "leadspace_title": "Titre de l'espace principal",
  "leadspace_copy": "Utilisez cette zone pour une courte ligne de copie pour soutenir le titre",
  "content_block_mixed_heading": "Bloc de contenu - Groupes mixtes",
  "content_block_segmented_heading": "Bloc de contenu - Segmenté",
  "content_block_simple_heading": "Bloc de contenu - Simple",
  "content_block_media_heading": "Bloc de contenu - Avec média"
}

Once you run yarn build, the exported files will be found in the dist folder, and each locale will also output its own folder containing all of the translated pages from the original template.

Urls for the above examples would output as:

• /en-us/index.html
• /fr-ca/index.html

Note, if there is only one language folder in /src/locales, then the output will not generate the corresponding language/locale folders, and would generate in the root distribution folder:

• /index.html

SASS compilation and carbon-components

There may be times pathing errors are encountered when importing certain

stylesheets (like carbon-components). We're working hard to fix these, but in the meantime you can add the following to your .env file to resolve:

SASS_PATH=node_modules:src

Note: For Windows, the syntax is slightly different

SASS_PATH=./node_modules;./src

Right-to-Left (RTL)

Right-to-left rendering is supported, and is automatically set for the following language codes:

• ar (Arabic)

For example, creating Arabic pages for Saudi Arabia would be auto-generated in RTL for any locale content under /src/locales/ar-sa.

Things to Note

If building an IBM.com page, there are items that need to be included which can be viewed here:

Building for IBM.com

Digital Data Object

The Digital Data Object (DDO) is a flexible, customizable collection of metadata that also provides tools and services such as live chat and analytics to page authors. You can find more details on Building for IBM.com.

The template has a placeholder DDO you can define located in src/layouts/base.hbs. Example values shown below:

<script>
  digitalData = {
    page: {
      category: {
        primaryCategory: '' // e.g. SB03
      },
      pageInfo: {
        effectiveDate: '', // e.g. 2014-11-19
        expiryDate: '', // e.g. 2017-11-19
        language: '{{i18n "base_lang"}}', // e.g. en-US, automatically updated
        publishDate: '', // e.g. 2014-11-19
        publisher: '', // e.g. IBM Corporation
        version: 'Carbon for IBM.com',
        ibm: {
          contentDelivery: '', // e.g. ECM/Filegen
          contentProducer: '', // e.g. ECM/IConS Adopter 34 - GS83J2343G3H3ERG - 11/19/2014 05:14:02 PM
          country: '{{i18n "base_country"}}', // e.g. US, automatically updated
          industry: '', // e.g. B,U
          owner: '', // e.g. Some Person/City/IBM
          siteID: '', // e.g. MySiteID
          subject: '', // e.g. SW492
          type: '' // e.g CT305
        }
      }
    }
  };
</script>

Meta Tags and Analytics

The template already renders the required meta tags and IBM.com analytics script that are required for IBM.com websites.

They are located in src/layouts/base.hbs.These can be adjusted/removed to fit your project and needs.

Meta Tags:

<meta charset="UTF-8" />

<link rel="icon" href="//www.ibm.com/favicon.ico" />

<meta name="dcterms.date" content="YYYY-MM-DD" />
<meta name="dcterms.rights" content="© Copyright IBM Corp. 2021" />
<meta name="geo.country" content="US" />
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />

IBM.com Tag Management and Site Analytics Script

<!-- IBM Tag Management and Site Analytics -->

<script
  src="//1.www.s81c.com/common/stats/ibm-common.js"
  async="async"
></script>

Upgrading from the Template

To pull latest changes from the Carbon for IBM.com HTML template, this repo can be added as a remote to your application repository:

git remote add template https://github.com/carbon-design-system/carbon-for-ibm-dotcom-web-components-template.git

Then run git fetch to update the changes:

git fetch --all

And finally merge changes in:

git merge template/main