Shepherd.js has come a long way since its inception in 2014, and I am very pleased to announce the next major release, Shepherd 4.0! 🎉 It is now easier than ever to create full featured site tours for your website or app.

We rewrote a significant chunk of the library from the ground up, using Preact and nano-css, switched styles from SCSS to CSSinJS, simplified the API, and tweaked the demo and API docs for a more cohesive experience. We also solidified our IE11 support, and made everything work out of the box with no need to add any more polyfills yourself, and focused heavily on improving our a11y support.

Table of Contents

API Simplification

We had several APIs that accepted more than one input format, such as attachTo and advanceOn , which was both making the code harder to maintain and causing unnecessary confusion for users. In the spirit of keeping things simple, we removed the string options in favor of passing an object hash of options. For example attachTo now only supports this format:

tour.addStep({ attachTo : { element : '.my-class-selector' , on : 'bottom' } });

IE 11 Support

We always advertised IE 11 support, but we did not test it as often as we should have. Sometime during the 2.x or 3.x era, we unwittingly broke support for IE. Most people did not notice, as you are likely already shipping a ton of polyfills, if your app supports IE, but for those who were not, things were broken.

We tried to remove some usage of ES2015+ features that IE did not support, and we also started shipping the minimum polyfills needed for IE compatibility. This does add a bit of bloat for people who do not intend to support IE, but we wanted to ship what we promised first, and work on opting in/out to the IE polyfills later.

Styles

CSSinJS

We wanted to find an easy way to include all of our styles in our JS bundle, rather than shipping separate stylesheets, and we decided we wanted to explore CSSinJS solutions to solve this. After a lot of searching for the smallest CSSinJS library, we settled on using nano-css. It is small and simple, but also provides a powerful API.

Including the styles in the JS does increase the bundle size, but it is the same amount of bytes, or less, as including the old stylesheets separately. nano-css also allows for setting prefixes for class names as well, which has helped us launch our new prefixing feature.

classPrefix

You can pass classPrefix in your tour options, and all shepherd-* classes will be prefixed. For example classPrefix: 'my-prefix' would yield my-prefix-shepherd-* style classes. This is an important feature if you potentially need to run two separate Shepherd instances and ensure they do not conflict with one another.

styleVariables

This also allowed us to revamp our approach to overriding style variables for theming. Previously, we used SCSS and SASS maps to allow overriding style variables. This worked, but required you to use SASS yourself. Now, with nano-css we are able to pass in JavaScript variables to set the styles. We do this via a styleVariables hash in your tour config.

const tour = new Shepherd.Tour({ ... styleVariables: { shepherdThemePrimary : '#00213b' , shepherdThemeSecondary : '#e5e5e5' }, ... });

You can see a full breakdown of the variables you can override here.

Preact

Switching to Preact components allowed us to greatly simplify our code. We had a lot of manual calls to create DOM, add and remove classes, and keep everything in sync with the tour options. Now everything is split into logical components. Things like the header, content, footer, cancel button, etc are all components now and handle their own logic, styles and classes.

a11y

There was an issue opened on the Shepherd GitHub repo awhile ago, asking about a11y support. We had always wanted to make Shepherd as accessible as possible, but lacked the knowledge on what exactly to do. Luckily, with help from @gorner and @knoobie, as well as an amazing post on making modal dialogs accessible, we were able to ship arrow key navigation, the proper aria attributes, focus trapping, etc to make things more accessible for both keyboard users and screen readers.

Revamped Demo

We revamped our outdated demo and tweaked the styles a bit, to make things a bit more modern. We plan to release several different demos and examples showing off all the possibilities of Shepherd in the coming months. Stay tuned!

New JSDoc Site

We were previously using ESDoc to generate our API docs, but it was hard to customize, and we found ourselves wanting a nicer looking solution, that allowed us to nest our other pages alongside the generated docs. After spending several days exploring various tools, we finally decided to use JSDoc and to fork and extend a nice existing theme.

The original theme is here and our extended and tweaked theme, used for our doc site currently, can be found here.

JSDoc has the concept of tutorials, which are extra pages you want to add to your docs. We used these to add a section on theming and our existing usage docs, and nest them alongside the generated API docs, instead of being separate, like they were before.

Having everything in one place should make for a much more cohesive and easy to follow docs experience.

New Website

As things were evolving for 4.0, we realized we needed a dedicated home for all things Shepherd, and bought the domain https://shepherdjs.dev/. We have slowly been rebranding the demo page, and plan to host all the docs, demos, examples, and a landing page on this new site.

We hope everyone will try out the new and improved Shepherd 4.0 and please let us know your thoughts!

If you would like us to help integrate Shepherd into your app, please contact us. We would love to work with you!