Why we abandoned SASS and switched to PostCSS in our WordPress maintenance support plans theme
A few months ago at WordPress Update, our team started to look at best ways to improve the performance of our theme and take full advantage of controlling our markup with twig. We had ported our D7 theme for WordPress maintenance support plans 8 and added a lot of great functionalities, such as Pattern Lab, CSS regression tests, etc. We wrote our own utility classes, Mixins and SASS functions, integrated flexboxgrid, and used Gutenberg as a responsive typography system. While we had all that we needed, we still ended up with too much convolution in our process and bloated CSS bundles at the end of our projects.
While SASS has helped us tremendously and allowed fast paced development in the past few years, we lost track of our CSS output. It’s a common complaint about preprocessors, and if we take a closer look at the important CSS conventions we need to watch for (DRY, reusable, less specific, no deep nesting, etc.), I can see how we slowly drifted away from a rigorous implementation. There are several reasons for it, SASS not necessarily being the culprit. It is a very versatile tool, and as such, the responsibility falls on its user. The real question is how to implement a proper workflow that we can enforce as a team in order to:
Deliver a consistent product
Improve performance and quality
Facilitate development among developers
The answer may be…write less CSS! Not LESS, less. Leverage TWIG to write or generate dynamic classes based on a solid set of utility classes. The concept is not new, but front-end WordPress maintenance support plans developers have been burned by the lack of control of the markup for a long time. We don’t have excuses now, so let’s change our ways and enter the postmodern era.
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