Schoolbox "Sonar UI" updates

Versions

• Schooltape >=4.5.4
• Schoolbox >=26.0.0

INFO

This update (v4.5.4) accidentally broke styles for schools with sonar UI disabled, a release has been published (v4.5.5) and may take a few hours to roll out via extension web stores - sorry! Please see issue #393 for the latest information.

tl;dr "Sonar UI" is now disabled when themes are enabled, and broken functionality of the extension has been fixed.

This update rolls back Schoolbox's "Sonar UI" when themes are enabled. Unfortunately this doesn't work for when themes are disabled due to technical limitations. I meant to get to this around three weeks ago when they published the changes on their documentation site, but have been busy, sorry about that! If you find any issues, please report them on the GitHub issue tracker.

This is my first and last blog post for Schooltape so you don't need to worry about opting out of these for every update, I just thought it was informative because of the major changes.

change log

Please refer to GitHub Issue #393.

These will likely be the last updates I will make to Schooltape.

looking for a maintainer

If you're interested in picking up maintainership please contact me directly via email Experience in HTML, CSS, and JS required - Typescript and Svelte is preferred.

bonus technical info

The "Sonar UI" update may look bad, but Schoolbox made some very nice changes to the CSS styling, consolidating most of it into a set of CSS variables rather than the mess that was before.

Changes made to Schooltape can be seen on this branch.

At the moment Schooltape rolls back by disabling the sbx-core.css and skin.css.php stylesheets. This works because most of the old variables are fallbacks, so if the new ones are missing it reverts to them.

Unfortunately skin.css.php no longer contains the legacy CSS variables, meaning there are a plethora of issues if you simply delete these without manually specifying them. It may be possible to derive the old CSS variables from the new ones, but I'm not going to invest time into that if the old CSS variables may be phased out completely in future updates.

"Sonar UI" will no longer be under an optional toggle for school IT admins following the v26.2 release in the coming weeks. (source). Hopefully this doesn't mean this upcoming release will remove all the old fallbacks, as that would mean the current method of rolling back to the old styles would no longer work.

bonus history

It's been over 3 years since the v1 release of Schooltape. It has been an important learning experience, and I have enjoyed making something that helps a few people :)

There's still a bunch of improvements that could be implemented in Schooltape, but weren't due to lack of time/motivation and technical complexity. I plan to release the Quick CSS editor as a small replacement to "User Snippets" for making small local CSS changes, this obviously doesn't aim to be a full blown userstyles manager like Stylus. Other than that there were also plans to have a "Quick Switcher" - a plugin that opens a popup to quickly fuzzy search and navigate between homepages, but I ran into trouble mounting the Svelte component due to the way plugins are currently dynamically imported (it destroyed the build time unfortunately). There was also an account system that would allow for user creation and distribution of CSS snippets on a per-school basis using hashes of the domain, but this was scrapped due to complexity and privacy concerns. I also made a small wrapper / scraping library called serrator (like a tape dispenser yk) which could be used as a library for building a desktop app - or a Schoolbox plugin, for example custom components to replace the current ones. It would also be nice to support additional colour scheme.

Take care of yourselves. Bye 👋