Vanilla Components v1 - Intro for Existing Users

Hi there, thanks for being an awesome Embeddable user! As you probably know, since you’re reading this document, we’ve released a major upgrade to our Vanilla Components repository.

TL;DR:

• You can now import vanilla components as an NPM dependency instead of keeping a fork of it and merging in changes (like you currently do).
  • This means you can benefit from the latest vanilla components changes by simply updating the package version (instead of having a worry about merge conflicts)

"dependencies": {
    "vanilla-components": "^1.0.0"
    ...
}

• We have also introduced theming so you can apply color, font and other styles to all your vanilla components in just a few lines of code.
  • E.g. you can change all the colours and fonts in all your components with just a couple of lines of code:

{
  charts: {
    colors: ["#c5fae2", "#7ef2be", "#2ce391", "#00cc70"],
  },
  font: {
    family: "Inter",
  },
}

• If you want to benefit from either of the above, there are some migration steps you'll need to perform. Please read on for more info.

Things to Know

These two features are being released together, and to use one you’ll need to use the other. Also, while awesome, these features come with a couple of significant caveats that we want folks to be aware of. Here they are:

1. If you have made changes to your existing vanilla components, switching to V1 will involve some changes to your repo. Fear not! This guide is here to help you navigate them.
2. If you choose to use Vanilla Components as a package, you do lose the opportunity to customize their code. Fear not! This guide will help you assess that choice and explain how you can put together a best-of-both-worlds scenario.
3. This change marks the end of major development on Vanilla Components from our side. Fear not! We’re not even close to slowing down - we’ve got big component plans underway and will announce more as they get further along.

One final thing we want to be very clear: you do not have to make this upgrade. If you’re happy with your current setup and are not worried about potentially missing out on a few upcoming charts … keep what you have! We will continue to put out small bug fixes as patch releases, but we’ll do that for both the v0 and v1 versions of Vanilla Components.

What to Expect

• v0 - continued bug fixes if/when any bugs are identified
• v1 - Some small chart improvements, possibly a handful of new charts, continued bug fixes
• The Future - A core rewrite of all charts, many new charts, even better theming, more customization options

Should We Switch to Packaged Components / Themes?

There are a handful of questions you need to answer! Here’s a handy choose your own adventure scenario that should help:

What Should We Do If We’re Not Switching To v1?

TL/DR: nothing! 🎉

If you’ve already made significant changes to your components, or just don’t need themes/packaging and don’t want your engineers to have to deal with the upgrade, you can stay on our v0 release.

As mentioned above, we will be fixing bugs in both v0 and v1. Just keep pulling from the main branch of the vanilla-components repo to get our incoming fixes and merge them into your codebase.