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How to Use CodePen: What if there was a platform where you could edit code, test a library, framework, or component, and see the changes happen right in front of your eyes? And what if you could share your experiments with other developers or copy their work to improve your coding skills, find inspiration, and fix bugs in your work quickly?
CodePen is a development platform where anyone can edit front-end languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from their browser without having to download any software. The best part is that you can see the results in real time, which makes it easier to fix bugs. Developers and designers can also make code snippets, which are called “pens,” and share them with the rest of the world.
How to Use CodePen
- Open CodePen.io
- Type anything in the search box: You can type anything that you wish on adding to your webpage. It can be a responsive slider, a team card, about section, animations, etc. In this article, I will add a beautiful slider. So go on and search beautiful slider in the search box.
- Code extraction: Now, as you can see, the Codepen editor shows us the amazing code that made this slider. But do you think it would work to just copy the code from this editor and paste it into yours? NO is the answer. Most of the “pens” you see use libraries outside of CodePen that the editor doesn’t show.
- The zip contains two folders dist and src along with a readme and license text file. You can explore/read them for your interest. Now select the “dist” folder and there you’ll see index.html, style.css, and script.js files. Open all of these in a text editor(Sublime, Atom, Brackets, etc).
- Open the index.html file
What is CodePen used
Sharing or collecting ideas
Because CodePen has built such a great community, thousands of users are making and sharing ideas for front-end components, animations, and even almost-finished web page layouts. This is the perfect place to share your own ideas that might be helpful to other front-end professionals. All you have to do is make sure that your code doesn’t have any copyright issues.
Style-guide your project
If you don’t want to use other people’s code, you can always use CodePen’s online code editor to give your project’s parts their own style. This way, you can make sure that code meant to style other components doesn’t change yours. It’s kind of like a blank canvas.
Find out about a new framework or library
The browser-based editor on CodePen is a great way to test and run a new library or framework. You don’t have to set up a new environment every time you want to see if your changes work. The editor view shows the three editing areas and the preview at the same time. Every time something changes, the final results are updated.