Learn Algolia, Scss and Xstream

It's tempting to pick up a framework which has preselected flexbox or grid as the layout tool of choice, but it's important to learn when and why to use each method. This leads to slimmer stylesheets which results in better site performance, and less likelihood for "hacks" to make one method do what the other does inherently better.

Throughout this collection, we will be progressively styling a responsive landing page template while building your knowledge on when to select grid or flexbox for any layout scenario. Spoiler alert: sometimes the best solution is using both!

The specification describes a CSS box model optimized for user interface design. In the flex layout model, the children of a flex container can be laid out in any direction, and can “flex” their sizes, either growing to fill unused space or shrinking to avoid overflowing the parent.

flexbox

Create a Landing Page with CSS Grid and Flexbox

Today’s users expect great things from their search experiences — speed, relevance, and usability, to name a few. Algolia provides developers with out-of-the-box and customizable search experiences that are a joy to build.

This introductory course on the Algolia search solution focuses on the user-facing part of search. Using the Algolia InstantSearch.js front-end library, we’ll see how to build an engaging search experience in no time. (28 minutes, to be exact.) 

**Prerequisites:** 
You don’t need previous experience with search to follow this course — we’ll use an example index with an e-commerce data set preconfigured. We will work mainly in JavaScript, so basic JS knowledge is expected.

If you want to play with your own index settings and data set, you can [create a free Algolia account here](https://www.algolia.com/users/sign_up/hacker/?utm_medium=link&utm_source=egghead&utm_campaign=education), but this is not required to follow along with this first course. 

Algolia's full suite APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences for their customers across all platforms and devices. Type a query. Click a link. Open an app. Everything your customers do sends a signal about what they want. Algolia decodes that intent to deliver the right content - instantly.

algolia

Getting Started with Algolia InstantSearch.js

CSS uses a global namespace for CSS Selectors that can easily result in style conflicts throughout your application when building an application using modern web components. You can avoid this problem by nesting CSS selectors or use a styling convention like BEM but this becomes complicated quickly and won’t scale.

CSS-in-JS avoids these problems entirely by generating unique class names when styles are converted to CSS. This allows you to think about styles on a component level with out worrying about styles defined elsewhere.

In this course, you will learn how to express popular SCSS (Sass) language features using latest JavaScript features. We will convert simple examples from SCSS to CSS-in-JS. As a designer or (S)CSS developer, you should be able to follow without extensive JavaScript knowledge, understanding SCSS is required though. We will not be using any particular CSSinJS libraries. Instead, we will focus on a base knowledge you need later if you use any CSSinJS library.

Sass is the most mature, stable, and powerful professional grade CSS extension language in the world.

scss

Convert SCSS (Sass) to CSS-in-JS

Have you ever wished for access to conditionals or iteration when writing styles? How cool would it be to use functions to write styles? SCSS has that and more! SCSS is a superset of CSS. Any valid CSS is SCSS, they even have the same syntax. SCSS borrows features from other languages to write smarter, reusable and more readable styles. This course will focus on how to use SCSS’s more useful features, compare them against each other and assess when their usage is appropriate.

Learn the Best and Most Useful SCSS

The stats widget is used to display useful insights about the current results like the number of hits and the time taken to compute the results inside the engine.

Inform users about the current result set with Instantsearch JS Stats widget

The first step to implement Algolia on the front end using Instantsearch : importing and setting up the library with your credentials. This is what will allow the library to initiate the connection to Algolia servers and the first step to complete before adding some useful widgets.

Set up the Instantsearch JS Library

In this lesson we’ll build a search experience reduced to it’s 2 essential components : a search input and the displayed results. As simple as it is, to build this from scratch would require a fair amount of work. Between listening to the input, making the api call, parsing and displaying the result... To build this using Algolia’s Instantsearch library requires a few lines of code with simply two widgets: the Searchbox and the Hits widget.

Search an Algolia Index with Instantsearch JS searchbox and hits widgets

Displaying barebones Hits won’t catch your user’s attention. The UI is key to provide a good search experience and hits are the meat of this experience so they need extra attention. By using Mustache templating we’ll see how to display rich results to your users. 

Display Rich results with templates in the Hits widget for Instantsearch JS

Every  good search UX make users understand instantly why a given hit is being displayed as part of the result set. One way to achieve that is to highlight the keywords from the query directly inside the Hits. This is built in the API JSON response and in this video we’ll explain how to leverage it easily.

Highlight Keywords in Query Results using the Instantsearch JS Hits Widget

Searching is obviously not limited to inputting text in a searchbox. If your dataset allows it Algolia can leverage of attributes and values. To make use of those facets on the front end, one of the most common widget that you can find in a search UI is the refinement list. With this widget, the user can filter the dataset based on facets. This widget only displays the most relevant facets for the current search context.

Filter Datasets with Facets using Instantsearch JS to add a Refinement List

The hierarchical menu widget is used to create a navigation based on a hierarchy of facet attributes. We generally implement it for categories with subcategories.

Browse results based on a hierarchy of Facets (HierarchicalMenu) in Instantsearch JS

The range input is a simple but useful widget that allows a user filter the results by selecting a numeric range with a minimum and maximum input. In an e-commerce website for instance, this widget would be useful to limit the results where the price is comprised between $X and $Y.

Refine a dataset using a numeric range in Instantsearch JS with the Range Input widget

When performing a complex query, based on several active facets and filters, its tedious for the user to start from scratch if she has to unset all refinements one by one. Thanks to the clearAll widget, this task becomes a one click action for the user and is trivial to implement for us developers as it requires no configuration.

Reset all active refinements with the clearRefinements Instantsearch JS widget

When you have a large result set for a specific query and usually not displaying more than a few dozen simultaneously. Pagination is a popular widget that allows the user to switch between pages of the results.

Paginate Large Sets of Algolia Data with Instantsearch JS Pagination widget

All Instantsearch widgets are added to the page in a similar fashion and they also share a number of common options that we’ll cover in this video. We will be playing with a dummy menu widget that won’t be part of the final project just to showcase all those options.

How to Add Instantsearch JS widgets and their common attributes 

Cascading Style Sheets bring order and beauty to our applications.

In this lesson we'll learn how to convert our Sass code to CSS code. We'll take a look at the sass watch command and use it to listen for changes within our Sass code.

The `sass` executable can be downloaded globally through npm by running `npm i -g sass`.

Converting Sass To CSS

Manage the color palette used in your stylesheets by creating a map of variables and a function to access the values by key. This allows you to update the colors in one location to re-theme your application and eliminate manual find and replace.

Access Theme Color Values With Sass

Learn the fundamental difference between CSS grid and flexbox layout, and create utility classes for each `display` value. Then begin to apply and expand these concepts to style the landing page navigation.

Choose Between Grid or Flexbox for CSS Layout

Apply grid layout and see when it's necessary to break out a media query to overcome grid's lack of wrapping behavior. We'll also learn about a property that grid and flexbox share: `align-items`.

Use CSS Grid to Create Layout Columns

Grid offers us the easiest method to responsively center content. We'll use the grid property `place-content` to center the contents of `figure` to showcase our fictional product in use. Additionally, we'll learn about `object-fit` which is a modern technique that allows inline images to scale responsively within defined dimensions without distortion.

Responsively Center an Image and Caption with CSS Grid

View a preview of the form fields we'll be creating in this course, inclusive of custom CSS styles for text inputs, textareas, selects, multiselects, radio buttons, and checkboxes. Then get an overview of the base project and key parts of the Eleventy build process in regards to compiling with Dart Sass and use of Nunjucks for project template scaffolding. 

Prior experience with Eleventy or Nunjucks is not required, but you may also enjoy learning how to [create an Eleventy site from scratch](https://egghead.io/playlists/build-an-eleventy-11ty-site-from-scratch-bfd3?af=2s65ms) in less than 20 mins in my other egghead collection.

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