source: Developing/Style-Guidelines.md
path: blob/master/doc/

# Style guidelines

This document is here to help style standards for contributions
towards LibreNMS. These aren't strict rules but it is in the users
interest that a consistent well thought out Web UI is available.

### Responsiveness

The Web UI is designed to be mobile friendly and for the most part is
and works well. It's worth spending sometime to read through the
[Bootstrap website](http://getbootstrap.com/css/#grid) to learn more
about how to keep things responsive.

### Navigation bar

- Always pick the best location for new links to go, think about where
  users would expect the link to be located and name it so that it's
  obvious what it does.

- Ensure sub sections within the Navigation are separated correctly
  using `<li role="presentation" class="divider"></li>`.

- Only use [Font Awesome icons](http://fontawesome.io/icons/) within the Navigation. It speeds up page load times quite considerably.

### Buttons

Try to keep buttons colored to reflect the action they will
take. Buttons are set using Bootstrap classes. The size of the buttons
will depend on the area of the website being used but btn-sm is
probably the most common.

- Delete / Remove buttons: btn btn-danger

- Edit / Update buttons: btn btn-primary

- Add / Create buttons: btn btn-success

### Tables

Unless the table being used will only ever display a handful of
items - yeah that's what we all said, then you need to write your
table using [JQuery Bootgrid](http://www.jquery-bootgrid.com/). This
shouldn't take that much more code to do this but provides so much
flexibility along with stopping the need for retrieving all the data
from SQL in the first place.

As an example pull request, see [PR
706](https://github.com/librenms/librenms/pull/706/files) to get an
idea of what it's like to convert an existing pure html table to Bootgrid.

### Datetime format

When displaying datetimes, please ensure you use the format YYYY-MM-DD
mm:hh:ss where possible, you shouldn't change the order of this as it
will be confusing to users. Cutting it short to just display
YYYY-MM-DD mm:hh is fine :).

To keep things consistent we have the following variables which should
be used rather than to format dates yourself. This has the added
benefit that users can customise the format:

```php
# Date format for PHP date()s
$config['dateformat']['long']                             = "r"; # RFC2822 style
$config['dateformat']['compact']                          = "Y-m-d H:i:s";
$config['dateformat']['byminute']                         = "Y-m-d H:i";
$config['dateformat']['time']                             = "H:i:s";

# Date format for MySQL DATE_FORMAT
$config['dateformat']['mysql']['compact']                 = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%i:%s";
$config['dateformat']['mysql']['date']                 = "%Y-%m-%d";
$config['dateformat']['mysql']['time']                 = "%H:%i:%s";
```
