A key part of PostCSS is exploring the ever-increasing array of plugins available for the PostCSS ecosystem; in some respects, it can be likened to a journey of discovery. This is no different for single plugins, or those available within packs—we've already seen that many of these packs are made up of the same plugins that are available individually! Let's take a moment to review what we've learnt.
We kicked off our journey with a look at working with plugins that can help save time with writing—these can either be those that allow us to write in shorthand, or those that add missing styles, based on styles we specify in code. These also included some plugins that help provide fallback support for older browsers.
We then moved onto working with the postcss-short plugin, as an example of how we can reduce development time, before moving on to explore the Rucksack suite of plugins that can help add some of the missing elements we may need to use in CSS. To explore how Rucksack works, we started with a simple easing demo, before working our way through a more complex demo of a slider and converting it to use Rucksack, and exploring some of the ways in which this plugin pack can help in our development.
Next up in our journey came a look at what should be a crucial part of any development workflow for a developer—checking our code for consistency, and optimizing it. We covered the use of the cssnano and stylelint plugins, and how they can be tailored to our needs.
We then rounded out the chapter by revisiting support for older browsers—we supplemented our earlier visit with a more in-depth look at what is available within PostCSS; we explored the fact that many fallbacks are primarily caused by IE, and discussed how we can either help support older versions of this browser, or whether we should consider consigning support for some older browsers to history.
Phew, this was a real whirlwind tour through the plugin packs available for PostCSS! Our journey does not stop here, as we now need to pull all of the last few chapters together and produce a complete custom processor—this will be the subject of the next chapter.