Alpha

Alpha.CA.gov is no longer being updated.

This was a 12-week pilot project in 2019-20 that explored new approaches for state websites.

If you need the current state homepage, visit CA.gov.

Fellow Californians,

We're reimagining CA.gov with and for the people of California.

Our first step: Make CA.gov easier for Californians to use. We're working to help you access the services and information you need.

And we invite you to join us.

Follow our progress

We're sharing our work and insights on our blog and GitHub.

Share your feedback

Please take our five-minute survey to help improve CA.gov. Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts.

We're excited to work with you.

Team Alpha.CA.gov

Interested in how we got started? Learn more.

Building

Prerequisites

• install node.js
• run npm install

Build command

npm run build

Concatenates, minifies and removes unused CSS.

Translations

We are using a google spreadsheet as the datasource for our content strings because it has a cool integrated formula to provide automatic translation values we can use while we wait for our human translators to review. The spreadsheet is at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pjhiNZQtlb1KCrkdMTbYcvzhZkffNQpG5ekpmAU_SkM/edit#gid=0 and is accessible to alpha members. We publish the strings publicly when the spreadsheet is changed. To pull in new translations:

• Add your new strings to the google spreadsheet
• Run the command: npm run gimmetranslations to pull the latest translation strings into the local file system
• Run the build command to regenerate the site with latest translations: npm run build
• Checkin the updated src/lang-global.csv along with your file updates so the builds run on the server which do not pull latest translation strings will run with latest content.

Files only in /public

Some static files are only present in the public folder and are set to be ignored by the webpack clean plugin which deletes stuff in there with every build:

• web.config (webserver configuration)
• robots.txt
• sitemap.xml

Concatenates, minifies and removes unused CSS, builds template partials.

Class event triggers

Please follow the convention of using classnames with a js- prefix when using a selector in javascript to interact with an element. We should not allow any CSS attributes to be added to the js- classnames so these will be used only by javascript and can be safely removed if a listener is changed.