Design and Prototyping for Drupal

Working with LessCSS on a Team

While there is much that is awesome about working with LessCSS, there is one minor sticking point. If you are working in LessCSS on a project that other people are contributing to, each person on the team who is touching the CSS of the project must also be working in LessCSS.

Although I’ve been able to figure it out with time, this has burned me a couple of times. Since LessCSS depends on being able to compile your .less files into .css files, anyone who wants to add to the styles of a given site needs to update the .less file, not the .css file, and compile that .less file into standard CSS code. If, for example, one of your colleagues decides to change or add CSS to the site, and they add it into styles.css (like many of us instinctively would), the moment that you go back into styles.less and make updates, everything your colleague just wrote in styles.css would be overwritten when you compiled styles.less.

If you’re working on a project with a team—say you and another designer are working on a startup, and both of you will be theming the site—it’s important to discuss this early on in the project. If possible, train them on how to use LessCSS syntax (it’s really easy, once you get used to it) and point them to Less.app; if they can’t use Less.app for whatever reason, consider adding less.js to your theme’s .info file (make sure you download the less.js file to a folder called “js” in your theme folder as well), and let the server compile it for you. ...