Plumber box

Plumber extension to align boxes to the vertical grid.

Use this mixin whenever you need to add margins, paddings, and borders to a flexible container element without breaking the grid.

Installation

First, make sure to install and import plumber-sass before using plumber-box.

Manual

Download and extract the latest release, move _plumber-box.scss into the vendor folder of your project and import it:

@import "vendor/plumber-box";

NPM / Yarn

Install:

# NPM
$ npm install plumber-box --save-dev

# Yarn
$ yarn add plumber-box --dev

And import it in your project:

@import "node_modules/plumber-box/plumber-box";

Bower

Install:

$ bower install plumber-box --save-dev

And import it in your project:

@import "bower_components/plumber-box/plumber-box";

Usage

1. Set up the grid height for Plumber if you haven't done it before:

@include plumber-set-defaults($grid-height: 1rem);

2. Include the plumber-box mixin. Specify margins and paddings as multiples of the grid height.

blockquote {
	@include plumber-box(
		$margin: 2 0, // top margin: 2, bottom margin: 0
		$padding: 1 1 // top padding: 1, bottom padding: 1
	);
}

This will generate the following CSS:

blockquote {
	margin-top: 2rem;
	padding-top: 1rem;
	margin-bottom: 0;
	padding-bottom: 1rem;
}

Borders

Borders can be set on the inside or on the outside of the box, taking away some space from the padding or margin respectively.

Inside

Add the $border parameter to the mixin, define borders and box-sizing:

blockquote {
	@include plumber-box(
		$margin: 2 0,
		$border: 2px 2px,
		$padding: 1 1
	);

	border: 2px solid gold;
	box-sizing: border-box;
}

The border width will be substracted from the padding.

Inside borders cannot be used with 0 padding.

Outside

Use the CSS outline property to add outside borders:

blockquote {
	@include plumber-box(
		$margin: 2 0,
		$padding: 1 1
	);

	outline: 2px solid gold;
}

The outline will visually decrease the margin but it is not included in the element size so it won't break the grid.

Rounded borders are not possible with this method.

Shorthands

You can use shorthands to set the same top and bottom values:

blockquote {
	@include plumber-box(
		$margin: 2, // top and bottom margin
		$border: 1px // top and bottom border
		$padding: 1 // top and bottom padding
	);
}

API

plumber-box

The main mixin.

Parameters: All parameters are optional, the default grid height can be set with plumber-set-defaults.

Name	Description	Type	Default value
$grid-height	Override the default grid height	Any unit	As set in Plumber
$margin	Top and bottom margin as a multiple of grid height	One or two integers	0
$border	Top and bottom border width	One or two non-negative px values or 0s	0px
$padding	Top and bottom padding as a multiple of grid height	One or two non-negative integers	0

Output: margin-top, margin-bottom, padding-top, padding-bottom properties with the same unit as the grid height.

License

MIT License