Finding your way without a Compass: Lightning fast theming workflow with Grunt, Libsass and Livereload

Many modern Drupal themes use Compass as a tool for preprocessing CSS. At the same time, Compass is written in Ruby, which can really slow down on a complex theme.

This session is about automating your theming workflow using Libsass, Grunt and Livereload to achieve lightning fast compile times for SMACSS themes.  We are going to focus on the tools teams can use to replace Compass in your workflow while still being able to do vendor-specific prefixing, vertical rhythm, sprite generation, color manipulation and more. I will share with you some of the techniques we use to work with themes like Zen and Omega using this stack without needing to make any major changes to the core files.

As a bonus, we are going to talk about automating javascript linting and minification using the same tools, and creating a portable stack that can be deployed for multiple projects.