Add SCSS build feature to CMS or website infrastructure

[juliandoucette]

Background

We have started using SCSS in websites projects starting with acceptableads.com. Because acceptableads.com had a hard deadline, we decided that it was acceptable to push CSS built by SCSS into our website repository. However, this is a bad idea because it adds duplicate code to the repository.

What to change

I suggest we do one of the following:

1. Integrate a build command into our websites infrastructure
   • This could be done via CMS or cron?
2. Integrate building SCSS into our CMS test server and build command

[kvas]

If we're going to use SCSS for all/most of our websites (which is probably not a bad idea) it would be useful to add support for it to the CMS. Perhaps it would be even better to have it as some kind of extension (at the moment we don't have any kind of extension support in the CMS but it seems like it would be good to add it). Anyway, Julian, could you describe in a bit more detail how you could see this working as a part of CMS? Something like "I put the SCSS files here, they are compiled at this stage and available under this URL, ..."

As for implementation part, I looked at Python libraries for SCSS and I found these three:

• ​pyScss -- has pure python mode and accelerated mode using a C extension,
• ​python-scss -- looks dead, recommends going for pyScss,
• ​libsass-python -- fast and feature complete but depends on libsass and a fancy C++ compiler so seems more complicated to build.

At the first look pyScss seems the best fit for what we're doing to it. Also the APIs of pyScss and libsass-python seem fairly similar so if we figure out that we want to go for the latter, it should not be too hard to switch.

[juliandoucette]

Let's resolve this in #5335.