We are developers who felt the struggle of managing product copy in startups and big companies.
Actually, we have built Frontitude mainly because currently working with copy at the development phase involves too much friction from developers.
We are excited to release Frontitude's Developer CLI -- a powerful tool that will save developers' time, and help teams ship product copy more efficiently.
Hardcoded strings, piles of engineering tickets, and tons of copy-and-paste
In many companies, the current process is rough and inconsistent. Here are some of the problems design and development teams face:
- Developers waste time copying and pasting copy from the design tool to the code
- Since it is a manual process, human errors occur pretty often
- As developers focus on core tasks, copy-related tickets pile up
- Last-minute copy edits require team effort
- Strings are usually hardcoded in mono-language products, adding another barrier to global expansion
Connect your codebase to your team's source of truth
Frontitude helps product teams to manage their product copy with a single source from design to development. This new integration allows developers to automatically receive updates from design and localization teams.
This ability brings developers some major benefits:
- No more copy-paste mistakes when moving texts from design to code
- Development can start without finalized copy since merging last-minute changes turns from team effort into a single command
- Developers quickly understand what copy was updated using their IDE instead of going through endless design files
Connect to your team’s Frontitude workspace
frontitude init
Initialize the CLI by choosing the Frontitude projects to connect (or the entire library) and the destination strings file (if none exist, the CLI will create one).
The CLI automatically detects the strings file format and is ready to update it without any further configuration. Whether you work with React, Angular, iOS, Android, or Flutter (soon), we’ve got you covered!
Pull the latest copy to your local machine or as part of the build process
Once the CLI is all set up, getting copy updates to the code is a single command away.
frontitude pull --status=final
The pull command fetches the latest copy revisions from Frontitude and updates the strings file according to its format.
Then, developers can review the changes and understand which new keys should be implemented in the UI components. Then, it’s just about pushing it to the remote repository.
Another way to use the CLI is to fetch the latest copy as part of your build. Using a generated access token, you can run it using your favorite CI/CD tool (Github Actions, Codeship, CircleCI, Jenkins, and more) and enjoy always-up-to-date environments.
What’s next?
The new CLI is just the beginning. There are many ways teams can integrate product copy with their development process which Frontitude is going to support:
- Update the latest copy in a database or CMS
- Push new copy for translation in translation management systems
- Update the latest copy in a development environment build
Stay tuned for updates soon!
Start getting copy updates from your terminal
The new CLI can be installed using NPM:
npm install -g @frontitude/cli
From here, follow the installation guide to get started as quickly as possible.
We hope you’ll enjoy the new CLI and would like to hear from you. Please share with us any suggestions, requests, or general feedback through our website chat, or post it on our Twitter account. We’re waiting for you :)
