Maintenance

Added

• Changelog as a seperate file, based on keepachangelog

Changed

• Update all packages to their latest version
• Update babel to include polyfills based on usage
• Restructure webpack configuration files to remove redundant code

Removed

• Removed shrink-ray library, due to it needing node-gyp which caused
  many problems interfering with the ease-of-use of this template

ESLint, Jest and template strings

• Switched from EJS for templating to basic HTML using template string interpolation.
  This change allows for much more flexibility, i.e. with react-helmet
  and dynamically requiring content, such as styles.
• Introduces PostCSS to enable autoprefixer, since support of older browser (looking at you IE) is still important.
• Implement eslint and basic configuration.
• Implements basic test engine using jest.
• Improves production build by executing steps in parallel.

Upgrade to Babel 7

• Switched to babel 7
• Switched to nodemon for watch mode

CSS chunking

• CSS chunking is back, thanks to the now webpack 4 compliant version of extract-css-chunks-webpack-plugin
  • Special thanks to @zackljackson for making this possible

Compression

• Implements server-side compression via shrink-ray
  • Compression is only enabled in production mode
  • Thanks to @zackljackson for the hint on shrink-ray
• Implements helmet for security-relevant response headers

Bugfix

• Exclude the node_modules directory from babel-transpilation to avoid errors when using other libraries like material-ui

Code-Splitting

• Implements code-splitting via react-universal-component
  as well as an example for using it.
• Replaces stage-0 with stage-2 babel-plugin
  due to it being a more advanced and stable spec
• Implements configuration for babel-preset-env to make actual use of the preset
• Removes cssHash from the application, since the extract-css-chunks-webpack-plugin
  is no longer implemented since version 2.0.0 of this template
  • There are plans to switch to mini-css-extract-plugin,
    but since it does not yet support HMR, I am gonna wait on that a little

Thanks to @arkhamRejek for contributing the code-splitting feature
as well as the babel-preset changes!

webpack 4

• Upgraded to webpack 4
• Upgraded to React 16.3
• Removed extract-css-chunks plugin in favor of extract-text-webpack-plugin,
  since the former is not supported with webpack 4 anymore
• Removes extract plugins for styles in development, to improve hot-reloading