Integrious adopts Backfire 4 Umbraco

Integrious has adopted the Backfire 4 Umbraco package from Matt Brailsford, after Matt put out a request for help maintaining some of the packages he's brought to the Umbraco community.

First of all, a big thank you to Matt for bringing Backfire to Umbraco - and to the guys at quplog who created the Backfire script.

For those of you who haven't come across Backfire before, it's a neat system which takes the long sought for "design in the browser" a major step forward. Most web developers these days will tweak sites using browser tools such as Firebug for Firefox, or the built in developer tools in Chrome and Safari (Internet Explorer, even the shiny new IE9, is still rather badly behind the field in this area). Unfortunately, we then had to manually copy the perfected CSS rules back to the sites stylesheets - or worse, bang our heads on our desks are we forgot to do so before refreshing the page and lost everything! Backfire solves this by providing a "Save CSS" button at the bottom of the browser window, which passes your tweaked rules back to the server. A handler on the server then saves them to the stylesheets for you. Brilliant!

We've got a few ideas for taking this package forward - for instance, we're going to tidy up the formatting of the CSS saved by Backfire 4 Umbraco and move the project forward to full release status, but we'd love to hear what everyone else wants from it! Let us know on the Backfire 4 Umbraco Codeplex project site.