Views - Project Managers

You may find yourself in a position where developers are already tasked with the back-end development of your new project, and you are now looking to onboard a front-end designer. This page will assume a project and staging environment has already been created for your project, and will step you through everything necessary to onboard a designer.

Installation

The designer must first do a base install of Apex on their local machine. The Docker based installation is recommended, as it's only a quick four line install. Full documentation can be found on the Docker Installation page.

Request Access

Once installed, the designer must run the following command in terminal:

apex acl request-package username/project

The ending part is replaced with yor Apex username, and the project name. If you are unaware of this information, please contact your back-end developer. This will create an access request from the designer to your project.

Grant Access Request

Once access has been requested, you must login to the Apex client area, and through the Access Control page you will see the pending access request from the designer, which you must approve.

Checkout Project

After access has been granted to the designer, they may checkout the project by running the command:

apex project checkout username/project

Again, replacing the last part with your Apex username and project name. This will checkout and download the entire project to the designer's local computer, and they are now fully setup and ready to begin development.

Completing Design Work

The designer can then go ahead and complete all necessary work on their local machine by following the documentation available at Views for Designers. The theme and template system within Apex has been made about as simple and straight forward as is possible, and any designer with a standard understanding of HTML / CSS should be able to work with Apex without issue.

Please note, Apex also makes no assumptions when it comes to the front-end framework that is being utilized and the designer is welcome to implement any front-end framework they would prefer such as React, Angular, ViewJS, et al. Please consult with your back-end developers for any endpoints the designers need to provide interactivity via React components and the like.

Uploading Work

Any time the designer wishes to upload their work, they can simply run the apex commit command. This will automatically upload all modifications they've made to the local project to the repository, and sync them to the staging environment hosted at http://project.username.apexpl.dev/ for your review.

That's literally all there is to it. If you have any questions or issues regarding onboarding your designer, please don't hesitate to post on the /r/apexpl sub-Reddit for a prompt and helpful response.