Elm UI Explorer

UI Component Explorers and Style Guides have been around for a while now. We don't build pages anymore but components that are assembled together to build systems.

In the Elm world, components are just called views, and are defined as pure functions. Elm UI Explorer takes advantage of the composability and the purity of Elm and offers a way to showcase your views and their states in a single tool. This project is inspired by React Storybook and styled with Tailwind

How to use it ?

Here is a basic example of a button showcased in Elm UI Explorer:

Add this to your Main.elm file.

    module Main exposing (main)

    import UIExplorer exposing (UIExplorerProgram, defaultConfig, explore, storiesOf)

    button : String -> String -> Html.Html msg
    button label bgColor =
        Html.button
            [ style "background-color" bgColor ]
            [ Html.text label ]

    main : UIExplorerProgram {} () {}
    main =
        explore
            defaultConfig
            [ storiesOf
                "Button"
                [ ( "SignIn", \_ -> button "Sign In" "pink", {} )
                , ( "SignOut", \_ -> button "Sign Out" "cyan", {} )
                , ( "Loading", \_ -> button "Loading please wait..." "white", {} )
                ]
            ]

Then in your Html add a link to the Elm UI Explorer stylesheet

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/kalutheo/elm-ui-explorer@master/assets/styles.css">

Checkout more examples here

• Button Example source| explorer demo | explorer with notes demo | app demo

• Design system source | explorer demo

Main Features

• Deep linking : You can easily share UI Explorer states by copying and pasting the url ( ex: attach them to your JIRA tickets, Pull Request etc... )

• Categories : Your UI Explorer can be divided into categories. Convenient if you have many views and you want to group them by family.

• Plugins : Elm UI Explorer has a mechanism that let you extend the tool by creating your own plugins. By defaults the library comes with built in plugins.

• Customization : You can make the header match your brand identity by changing colors, title and icons.

Best Practices

• In order to avoid CSS conflicts with built in UI Explorer Styles, consider using elm-css or elm-ui. Theses tools use technics that prevent styles collisions by scoping the css.

• All ids (Story names and categories) should be unique and be written in CamelCase without spaces or special characters (ex: DropDownMenu, Loading, Loaded etc... )

• For Hot Reloading, it's recommended to use Create Elm App

• Try to adopt SDD (StoryBook Driven Development), creating UI this way can be very efficient.

• Use Atomic Design paradigm. This will help you build a scalable Design System.