Introduction to the platform

1. Introduction to the platform

The stack of Fliplet is mostly based on Javascript — even server-side — therefore being familiar with it will be a strong requirement in building components and themes on our platform.

We also support some preprocessors like SASS and templating engines like Handlebars. You’re not required to use them, but they can boost your development quite a lot when building complex components.

What can you build

All of our components are open source and available on github.com/fliplet. Take a look at the variety of components you can create using Fliplet’s platform below.

App components

App components will enable your apps to run Javascript on all screens of a Fliplet App. CSS files and HTML/Handlebars templates will also be available on all screens.

Typical usage:

  • Analytics
  • Global settings for apps

Page components

Page components are similar to app components, but they also display output since they can be dropped onto a page. A page component can be dropped more than once on a page, and can be displayed inline or as a block element.

Typical usage:

  • Buttons
  • Charts
  • Video players
  • Lists

Providers

A provider is a particular type of component which only serves as a interface to provide data to other components.

Typical usage:

  • Select an image from the media library
  • Connect a button or link to a page
  • Select data from a data source

Themes

As the name suggests, themes enables you to customize any visual aspect of your apps. A Fliplet App can only be assigned to one theme.

A theme consists in CSS (or SCSS) and Javascript files.

Menus allow you to change the default header / top bar you in all Fliplet apps. It also contains the styles for when the hamburger menu is tapped and the list of the menu screens is presented to the user.

A menu consists in a handlebars template, and optionally CSS and Javascript files.

Development tools

Our primary development tool is called Fliplet CLI (Command Line Interface), it’s written in Node.js and is available through Npm.

This means in order to start the development you will need to install Node.js on your machine.

The Fliplet CLI will enable you to develop and test components and themes on your machine, without having to rely on our APIs or even be connected to the internet while coding.

Check the Quickstart section for more details about getting started with the development.

In the next section we’ll help you installing the development tools.

Quickstart →