Web Experience Toolkit (WET)
What is the Web Experience Toolkit?
- Collaborative open source project led by the Government of Canada
- Award-winning code library for building innovative websites that are:
- Flexible and themeable templates and reusable components
- Open source software
- Free to use for commercial and non-commercial purposes (MIT license - Terms and conditions)
- Developed openly by the community on GitHub
Key resources
Benefits
Accessibility
Usability
- Iterative approach to design
- Design patterns and usability testing (User Experience Working Group)
Interoperability
- HTML5-first approach (leveraging native HTML5 support and filling support gaps with “polyfills”)
- Supporting a wide variety of browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera)
- Building support for HTML data (RDFa 1.1 Lite, Schema.org)
Mobile friendly responsive design
- Adapts to different screen sizes and device capabilities
- Touchscreen support (jQuery Mobile)
- Optimized for performance
- Building support for device-based mobile applications
Multilingual
- Currently supports 3 languages (English, French and Spanish)
- Partial support for 29 languages (including right-to-left languages)
Themeable and reusable
- Flexible framework that supports custom themes
- Includes support for 5 different themes including a “Base” theme to use as a template
- Reusable templates, plugins and widgets
- Adapted to various CMS and programming frameworks (Drupal, WordPress, SharePoint (in development), DotNetNuke (in development), PHP, SSI and Java/Maven)
Reduces costs by openly sharing and collaborating
- Drives down research and development costs
- Avoids duplication of effort
- Produces better quality results
Collaborative approach
- Project managed openly on GitHub, including discussion through the issues tracker
- Encouraging a free flow of ideas, dialogue and innovation including sharing of challenges and ideas
- External contributions welcome
- Pull requests
- Design patterns
- Issues and suggestions
- Documentation
- Testing
- Multi-level review process for contributions to ensure code integrity (combination of automated and manual reviews)
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