- Skip to main content
- Skip to footer

# Web Experience Toolkit (WET)

## What is the Web Experience Toolkit?

- Collaborative open source project led by the Government of Canada
- Award-winning code library for building innovative websites that are:
  - Accessible, usable and interoperable
  - Mobile friendly
  - Multilingual
- Flexible and themeable templates and reusable components
- Open source software
  - Free to use for commercial and non-commercial purposes (MIT license - Terms and conditions)
  - Developed openly by the community on GitHub

## Key resources

- Benefits
- Working examples
- Documentation
- Downloads
- Main project
- Terms and conditions
- Contributor guidelines
- Versioning
- Version history
- Roadmap

## Benefits

### Accessibility

- Conforms to WCAG 2.0 level AA
- Leverages WAI-ARIA to further enhance accessibility
- Assistive technology testing (Access Working Group)

### Usability

- Iterative approach to design
- Design patterns and usability testing (User Experience Working Group)

### Interoperability

- HTML5-first approach (leveraging native HTML5 support and filling support gaps with “polyfills”)
- Supporting a wide variety of browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera)
- Building support for HTML data (RDFa 1.1 Lite, Schema.org)

### Mobile friendly responsive design

- Adapts to different screen sizes and device capabilities
- Touchscreen support (jQuery Mobile)
- Optimized for performance
- Building support for device-based mobile applications

### Multilingual

- Currently supports 33 languages (including right-to-left languages)
  - English
  - French
  - Afrikaans
  - Albanian
  - Arabic
  - Armenian
  - Bulgarian
  - Chinese
  - Chinese (Simplified)
  - Czech
  - Dutch
  - Estonian
  - German
  - Greek
  - Hindi
  - Hungarian
  - Icelandic
  - Indonesian
  - Italian
  - Japanese
  - Korean
  - Latvian
  - Lithuanian
  - Polish
  - Portuguese
  - Portuguese (Brazilian)
  - Russian
  - Slovak
  - Spanish
  - Thai
  - Turkish
  - Ukranian
  - Vietnamese

### Themeable and reusable

- Flexible framework that supports custom themes
- Includes support for 5 different themes including a “Base” theme to use as a template
- Reusable templates, plugins and widgets
- Adapted to various CMS and programming frameworks (Drupal, WordPress, SharePoint (in development), DotNetNuke (in development), PHP, SSI and Java/Maven)

### Reduces costs by openly sharing and collaborating

- Drives down research and development costs
- Avoids duplication of effort
- Produces better quality results

### Collaborative approach

- Project managed openly on GitHub, including discussion through the issues tracker
- Encouraging a free flow of ideas, dialogue and innovation including sharing of challenges and ideas
- External contributions welcome
  - Pull requests
  - Design patterns
  - Issues and suggestions
  - Documentation
  - Testing
- Multi-level review process for contributions to ensure code integrity (combination of automated and manual reviews)

## Version history

### v3.1

- v3.1 changelog
- WET v3.1.4 was released on September 17, 2013 (v3.1.4 release notes)
- WET v3.1.3 was released on August 6, 2013 (v3.1.3 release notes)
- WET v3.1.2 was released on June 27, 2013 (v3.1.2 release notes)
- WET v3.1.1 was released on May 16, 2013 (v3.1.1 release notes)
- WET v3.1.0 was released on April 11, 2013 (v3.1.0 release notes)
- WET v3.1.0 Release Candidate 1 was released on April 3, 2013 (v3.1.0 Release Candidate 1 release notes)
- WET v3.1.0 Beta 2 was released on February 15, 2013 (v3.1.0 Beta 2 release notes)
- WET v3.1.0 Beta 1 was released on December 21, 2012 (v3.1.0 Beta 1 release notes)

### v3.0

- v3.0 changelog
- WET v3.0.10 was released on September 17, 2013 (v3.0.10 release notes)
- WET v3.0.9 was released on August 6, 2013 (v3.0.9 release notes)
- WET v3.0.8 was released on June 27, 2013 (v3.0.8 release notes)
- WET v3.0.7 was released on May 16, 2013 (v3.0.7 release notes)
- WET v3.0.6 was released on April 11, 2013 (v3.0.6 release notes)
- WET v3.0.5 was released on February 15, 2013 (v3.0.5 release notes)
- WET v3.0.4 was released on January 24, 2013 (v3.0.4 release notes)
- WET v3.0.3 was released on December 21, 2012 (v3.0.3 release notes)
- WET v3.0.2 was released on November 15, 2012 (v3.0.2 release notes)
- WET v3.0.1 was released on October 9, 2012 (v3.0.1 release notes)
- WET v3.0 was released on September 17, 2012 (v3.0 release notes)

Date modified:
  2013-09-17