Dev Portfolio Project Part 2 - NavBar

by Daniel Truong

October 13, 2022 • 10 min read

Introduction 🥳

  • In this blog, we'll guide you to create a navigation bar for your website

Prerequisites 🥸

  • Cloned the website and able to run it locally ( If not: check previous part )

What you will learn 🤓

  • Brainstorming about website layout
  • Project folder + file structures
  • Components
  • Svelte #each loop
  • JavaScript Date object
  • ... many more

Let's Start 🤖

I. Website Layout 🌐

Here's what our final website will look like

Screen Shot 2022-10-13 at 3 20 27 PM

Here's how it'll be broken down before jumping to code

Screen Shot 2022-10-13 at 3 20 27 PM

II. Let's take a look at our project structure 👀

Here's what you will see when first start

Screen Shot 2022-10-13 at 8 54 34 PM

Although there're lots of folders to look at, we only focus on the "src" folder

Screen Shot 2022-10-13 at 8 56 04 PM

Here're the main files/folders you need to know

  • App.svelte is our main Svelte file
  • App.cssis our main global CSS file
  • lib folder contains our components which we will rename to "components" later on instead

Let's do a quick clean up by removing things we don't need

App.svelte: Delete everything but the tags

Screen Shot 2022-10-13 at 9 01 47 PM

App.css: Delete place-items:center ( line 30 ) since it'll make everything become center and we don't want that

Screen Shot 2022-10-13 at 9 09 43 PM

lib : Rename to components

Screen Shot 2022-10-13 at 9 03 23 PM

Delete Counter.svelte

Screen Shot 2022-10-13 at 9 04 12 PM

III. Good job, now let's start making our NavBar 🥳

  • Here's the NavBar we want to make:

About, Experiences, Projects are link to our sections, Thursday is the current date ( we'll use JavaScript Date Object to make this )

Screen Shot 2022-10-13 at 11 04 24 PM

  • In components folder, create a file called NavBar.svelte and add the necessary tags as follow

Note: You don't need to have all tags as below, you can even have just a <nav> </nav> tag and it's still valid in Svelte

Screen Shot 2022-10-13 at 9 08 38 PM

Now, let's see how component works in Svelte

  • Type anything between <nav> </nav> ( because if you want to display something, it has to be within a HTML tag ) in your NavBar.svelte file and save it

<p> </p> tag stands for paragraph

Screen Shot 2022-10-13 at 9 18 57 PM

  • Now, if you run your website using npm run dev, it won't display that words because you have to import it in App.svelte - our main Svelte file

Screen Shot 2022-10-13 at 9 21 05 PM

Tada !! that's how you import a component , when you run your website again, you should see it display NavBar content

Screen Shot 2022-10-13 at 9 23 16 PM

Now, let's go back to NavBar.svelte and start creating our navigation bar

You can copy paste this code block and read the comments to understand more

<script>

</script>

<nav>
 <!-- We're creating a navigation bar with 3 items: About, Experiences, Projects\-->

     <section class="container__nav" id="/">
        <ol>  
  <!-- the href=#something  links to each section so we can create a scroll to section feature\-->
           <li>
               <a href='#About' class="nav__item">
                  About
               </a>
          </li>
          <li>
               <a href='#Experiences' class="nav__item">
                 Experiences
               </a>
         </li>
      <li>
          <a href='#Projects' class="nav__item">
            Projects
          </a>
     </li>
   </ol> 
</section>
</nav>

<style>
/* This is CSS style for our navigation bar */
   ol {
    list-style: none;
  }
  li {
    padding: 0;
  }
  .container__nav {
    display: flex;
    justify-content: center;
    align-items: center;
    flex-direction: row;
  }
  .nav__item {
    color: white;
    font-weight: 600;
    font-size: 2rem;
    margin: 0 2rem;
    transition: all 400ms;
  }
  .nav__item:hover {
    color: rgb(0, 157, 255);
  }
  .time {
    color: #1a1a1a;
    font-weight: 700;
    background-color: #2C91C6;;
    padding: 0.35rem;
    margin: 0 2rem;
    border-radius: 12px;
  }
</style>

Now, when you save the file, our NavBar will look nicer

Screen Shot 2022-10-13 at 9 31 10 PM

⚠️ BUT, don't you think this block of code is kinda repetitive? we don't want to type the same thing every time we add a new item to our nav bar

<ol class="container__nav" id="/">
  <!-- the href=#something  links to each section so we can create a scroll to section feature-->
      <li>
      <a href='#About' class="nav__item">
        About
      </a>
     </li>
     <li>
      <a href='#Experiences' class="nav__item">
        Experiences
      </a>
    </li>
     <li>
      <a href='#Projects' class="nav__item"\>
        Projects
      </a>
     </li>
  </ol>

💡So, what we can do better by using Svelte #each loop, we'll create an Array of Objects that hold our nav items and then loop through every items and render it to the browser

NavBar.svelte

<script>
  // @ts-nocheck
  history.scrollRestoration = "manual" // Prevent automatic scrolling
  const navItems = [
    { title: "About", url: "#About" },
    { title: "Experiences", url: "#Experiences" },
    { title: "Projects", url: "#Projects" },
  ];

</script>

<nav>
  <section class="container__nav" id="/">
    <ol class="container_nav" id="/">
      {#each navItems as { title, url }}
        <li>
          <a href={url} class="nav__item">
            {title}
          </a>
        </li>
      {/each}
    </ol> 
  </section>
</nav>

<style>
   ol {
    list-style: none;
  }
  li {
    padding: 0;
  }
  .container__nav {
    display: flex;
    justify-content: center;
    align-items: center;
    flex-direction: row;
  }
  .nav__item {
    color: white;
    font-weight: 600;
    font-size: 2rem;
    margin: 0 2rem;
    transition: all 400ms;
  }
  .nav__item:hover {
    color: rgb(0, 157, 255);
  }
  .time {
    color: #1a1a1a;
    font-weight: 700;
    background-color: #2C91C6;;
    padding: 0.35rem;
    margin: 0 2rem;
    border-radius: 12px;
  }
</style>

JavaScript Date Object 📆

Display the current date with custom parameters

We can do that in the <script> </script> that allows us to use JavaScript magic

let time = new Date(Date.now()); // Create Date Object
const options = { // We'll need this option for toLocaleDateString() method later on to display on the weekday
  weekday: "long",
};

Then we can display it in our html like this to display current weekday:

<p class="time">{time.toLocaleDateString(undefined, options)}<p>

Here's the full code for NavBar.svelte

<script>
  // @ts-nocheck
  history.scrollRestoration = "manual" // Prevent automatic scrolling
  const navItems = [
    { title: "About", url: "#About" },
    { title: "Experiences", url: "#Experiences" },
    { title: "Projects", url: "#Projects" },
  ];
  let time = new Date(Date.now());
  const options = {
    weekday: "long",
  };
</script>

<nav>
  <section class="container__nav" id="/">
    <ol class="container__nav" id="/">
      {#each navItems as { title, url }}
        <li>
          <a href={url} class="nav__item">
            {title}
          </a>
        </li>
      {/each}
    <p class="time">{time.toLocaleDateString(undefined, options)}</p>
  </ol>
  </section>
</nav>

<style>
   ol {
    list-style: none;
  }
  li {
    padding: 0;
  }
  .container__nav {
    display: flex;
    justify-content: center;
    align-items: center;
    flex-direction: row;
  }
  .nav__item {
    color: white;
    font-weight: 600;
    font-size: 2rem;
    margin: 0 2rem;
    transition: all 400ms;
  }
  .nav__item:hover {
    color: rgb(0, 157, 255);
  }
  .time {
    color: #1a1a1a;
    font-weight: 700;
    background-color: #2C91C6;;
    padding: 0.35rem;
    margin: 0 2rem;
    border-radius: 12px;
  }
</style>

Now, you've successfully made the navigation bar 🤩 🤩 You can always check the full code HERE

#dev#svelte
Read as TXT: /blog/615.txt