Tailwind CSS is one of the most popular utility-first CSS frameworks, and it is truly taking the web development world by storm. Unlike some other popular CSS frameworks, Tailwind does not contain pre-designed components. On the contrary, it provides a wide range of utility classes that may be used to create the UI separately, allowing for far greater freedom and control over the designs. As a result, a developer can create a highly customizable and versatile website with minimal CSS code.
Tailwind is growing increasingly popular due to its efficiency, scalability, and usability. Its utility-first approach allows developers to simply create or execute responsive designs without having to write a lot of custom CSS. Furthermore, Tailwind’s just-in-time compilation guarantees that only the essential CSS is included in the final output, resulting in an extremely thin and efficient CSS file.
Tailwind’s qualities make it a choice among developers looking for ease of use, speed, flexibility, and maintainability in their online projects. Tailwind’s integration with WordPress, the world’s most popular content management system, expands the possibilities for dynamic, beautifully built websites.
Tailwind in WordPress
WordPress is a powerful content management system (CMS) that enables a variety of development techniques, including custom theme construction. With complete control over the HTML structure and the developer’s freedom to use any popular CSS framework of their choosing, such as Bootstrap, Tailwind, and so on, integrating Tailwind with WordPress must provide some unique issues.
One of Tailwind’s distinguishing features is its on-demand compiler, which requires developers to guarantee exactly how many classes are used within each template and that the template structure is repeated. It then generates CSS for each one individually. While this may be fine for tiny websites with a few pages, it becomes harder as the site grows. Managing Tailwind in WordPress themes is complicated when the themes include dynamic content, such as Gutenberg or ACF blocks (Advanced Custom Field blocks) because the page structure is determined in the database and cannot be generated statically.
The solution to this type of difficulty is a modular strategy in which blocks produce assets independently. However, this approach has the potential to be redundant, resulting in a handful of redundant CSS rules, which is inefficient. Fortunately, there is a simple solution – Advanced Views Framework. The framework solves this problem by providing an out-of-the-box modular approach, with built-in Tailwind support and dynamically linked CSS.
About the Advanced Views Framework
The Advanced Views Framework (AVF) is a specialized WordPress tool designed to elevate content display and functionality. It offers smart templates and powerful query capabilities, simplifying the development process for web developers and designers alike. Whether you’re pulling data from WordPress, WooCommerce, or any meta fields, like Advanced Custom Fields, Meta Box, or Pods, AVF provides a robust foundation for creating dynamic, responsive layouts without the typical complexity.
With AVF, you can easily manage multiple content sources and formats, making it a versatile choice for any project. The framework supports over 130 field types from various data vendors, allowing you to focus on the critical aspects of your project while AVF handles data binding, template generation, and seamless database connections.
For those new to the framework, an introduction video and comprehensive documentation are available to guide you through its features and capabilities. These resources ensure you can get started quickly and efficiently, whether you’re working independently or with a team. With features like reusable components, automatic template validation, and support for modern development workflows, AVF is a reliable and performance-optimized solution that has earned the trust of the WordPress community.
Tailwind vs. BEM
Block Element Modifier, often known as BEM, is another typical CSS architecture for binding styles to blocks, elements, and modifiers. BEM is popular because it minimizes CSS conflicts while also making it easy to follow the flowing HTML structure. While Tailwind concentrates on utility-first classes, BEM emphasizes the building of reusable components with fewer CSS specificity issues.
Advanced Views supports both Tailwind and BEM, letting developers select the technique that best fits the demands of their project. If you’re just getting started, Tailwind’s utility classes in your HTML code will save you a lot of time. On the other hand, if you plan to add new sections to an existing website and want to avoid conflicts, BEM may be a better alternative because it takes a more scientific approach to CSS.
In other words, Tailwind is ideal for speedy development and highly personalized designs, but BEM is not recommended for clean markup and disagreements in collaborative projects.
How to Use Tailwind in AVF Templates
Setting up AVF with Tailwind consists of a few steps, which are detailed in the AVF docs page and the Tailwind demo repo. Let’s display them in the appropriate order:
- Install AVF: Put the Advanced Views Framework plugin into your WordPress installation. When installing, you must activate File System Storage so that all of your View and Card templates, as well as their assets, are stored in your theme’s advanced views folder.
- Set up Tailwind: You can do thisby copying the tools directory from the demo repository to the root of your theme. This directory contains all of the files and configurations for using Tailwind. In case you’re getting started from scratch, you can employ the Tailwind + AVF starter theme.
- Create a style.css file for target Views and Cards, then add the following contents to it: (Note: Alternatively, you can add these lines to the Defaults tab of the plugin settings, so Advanced Views will put this content automatically for every new View or Card)
Css
Copy the following code: /* advanced-views:tailwind */ @tailwind components; @tailwind utilities
The @tailwind directives are expanded to the actual CSS for the utilized classes.
The /* advanced-views: tailwind */ comments inform AVF that the file contains Tailwind playground styles, and it can concatenate all of the component styles to prevent these combined styles from declaring the same styles.
- Compile Tailwind: Use the Tailwind CLI to convert classes from custom.twig files to the style.css files by running the yarn watch or yarn build commands in the tools directory.
- Optional Tailwind Configuration: If you wish to customize Tailwind’s behavior, modify the tailwind.config.js file in the tools directory. AVF scans. twig files dynamically, eliminating the need to declare each one individually in the Tailwind configuration’s content section.
With these steps, you can seamlessly integrate Tailwind and AVF. This will let you create a highly personalized and responsive WordPress website.
Conclusion
By combining Tailwind with WordPress via the AVF, you get an exceptionally powerful configuration for creating modern, dynamic websites. Tailwind’s utility-first strategy allows for significantly faster front-end development. AVF offers modular structures that make dealing with styles and scripts within WordPress simple.
Advanced Views: Pro Edition brings advanced features and extra integrations, such as support for complex fields, front-end asset management, and the ability to create reusable component libraries. These characteristics make AVF Pro an excellent solution for developers seeking to accelerate their productivity and create complicated, lightning-fast WordPress websites.
Using these, you can build a WordPress website that’s visually appealing using Tailwind and efficiently maintainable and scalable using AVF.