Learn Flexbox, React-router and Tachyons

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.

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Create a Landing Page with CSS Grid and Flexbox

Flexbox is a powerful way to layout HTML so that elements can grow to fit the size of their container.  It can also control how the elements are positioned within a flexed container.  

Once you start thinking in `rows` and `columns`, you can control almost any flexed layout with just a few simple flexbox layout primitives.

Get Started with Flexbox CSS Layouts

This playlist covers various aspects of CSS including different rules, selectors, and patterns

CSS Tips and Tricks

React Router v4 takes an entirely new approach to routing and handling URLs in your React applications. It fully embraces the concept of declarative programming and a component based development process. In practice, this turns out to be very nice and gives you a routing solution that is less configuration heavy than many previous solutions.

In this course, you will learn about the basics of React Router v4 to help you get started. We will look at the core components that React Router supplies and how they interact together to create a robust routing solution for your React applications.

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

Add routing to React apps using React Router v4

Flexbox is a wonderful tool built into the CSS specification. Using flexbox doesn't require any special framework or library, just a browser with CSS3 support. It is so awesome, and makes the arranging elements on a page almost fun!

Flexbox Fundamentals

React Router is the defacto router for any React application and it allows us to extract the state of our application from the browser's address bar.

In this course we'll explore the core features of React Router in common examples.  From routing with individual components to more complex routing consisting of multiple components, query-strings, route parameters,  and redirects.  

Getting Started with React Router v3

Routes are some times better served as a modal. If you have a modal (like a login modal) that needs to be routeable and appear on all pages you may need to use query params. Will explore how to render a route all the time and use query params to control when it's content renders

Create a Query Parameter Modal Route with React Router

After setting `display: flex` on a parent element, you can use `flex-direction` to switch the container to be either a `row` or a `column`.

We also switch the body between `row` and `column`.

Flex into a Row or a Column with flex-direction

We can space items inside of a flexed component in the "on-axis" direction, with `justify-content`.

Justify content can take the following values: `flex-start`, `flex-end`, `center`, `space-between`, `space-around`, or `space-evenly`

Change the Spacing of Flexed Components with justify-content

We changed the axis layout with 'justify-content', and the "off axis" layout is controlled by 'align-items'.  The most common values are `flex-start`, `flex-end`, or `center`.

Change the off-axis Alignment of a Flexed Container with `align-items`

To set the wrap settings of elements inside of a container, we can set the `flex-wrap` css attribute.  The most common values are: `nowrap`, `wrap`, or `wrap-reverse`

Wrap Elements Inside of a Flexed Container with `flex-wrap`

To stretch individual elements to fit the given space, we can set the `flex-grow` or `flex` attributes to any integer.  Other surrounding elements will grow proportionally to their `flex-grow` or `flex` attributes.

Proportionally Grow a Flexed Element by Setting `flex-grow` or `flex` Styles

Gatsby is a blazing fast static site generator built with React. Gatsby gives you all of the modern JavaScript tools you want; set up and ready to go out of the box.

gatsby

Restricting access to content that is delivered client-side in a Gatsby site takes a few steps. We use Netlify Identity to handle user authentication and reach router to build our auth-restricted client-side application.

Using Netlify Identity to control access to a Gatsby client-side dashboard route

We have a parent HTML element that takes up the height and width of the page. We will make that parent element into a flex container, and then vertically center its child element using `align-items: center;`. Finally, we'll use `justify-content: center;` to horizontally center the element.

Center an Element Horizontally and Vertically using Flexbox

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

See how to use flexbox to layout variable-width content in columns, and take advantage of `justify-content` to keep flex children center-aligned on smaller viewports. We'll also learn how `margin` can be applied to resolve for lack of a well-supported `gap` property in flexbox. At the end of the lesson, we'll have styled both the "Subscribe" section and the site footer.

Use Flexbox to Responsively Layout Variable-Width Content

CSS Grid and Flexbox are very useful tools for providing the overall layout of a page.  I take a specific design and create the high level layout using css grid and then arrange an individual section using flex box.

Layout a webpage using css grid and flexbox

With just a handful of CSS properties, we can create an intrinsically responsive photo gallery using flexbox. This is accomplished by setting our preferred width as the `flex-basis` value and allowing items to both shrink and grow. The use of `object-fit: cover` on images allows them to fully fill up the list item without distortion or overflow. We finish the gallery with a small animated effect that alters `opacity`.

Create an Automatically Responsive Flexbox Gallery

React Router v4 doesn’t require a lot of configuration to run. The core examples will run out of the box with Create React App. In this lesson, you will create an application and get React Router v4 up and running.

_**note**: in this video `react-router-dom` is installed with the `--save-dev` flag. This is **not required and may cause issues if used**. Simply install it with `npm install react-router-dom` and it will function as expected._

Run the React Router v4 Examples with Create React App

React Router 4 has several routers built in for different purposes. The primary one you will use for building web applications is the BrowserRouter. In this lesson you will import the BrowserRouter and create some basic Route components.

Create Basic Routes with the React Router v4 BrowserRouter

setRouteWillLeaveHook provides a method for us to intercept a route change before leaving the current route.

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