I'll trow in my two cents here.
You can use Composite C1 without having LESS (node js) support on you hosting environment. Getting this to work is extra work (compared to just installing a Starter Site) and it is probably a pretty annoying thing to have to go through, but basically you just need to change the css includes in the html from .less to .css (and make those css files using your favorite text editor).
If you run the site locally and have perfect nodejs/LESS support, you will find the CSS files gets generated for you on disk next to the .LESS files. Here you simply need to update your template html and change .less to .css and you can FTP away.
The reason we rely heavily on LESS in our starter sites is that they make skinning/theming crazy much cooler and the cost (fewer hosting setups will fully support us) kind of makes sense, since we get to make the Composite C1 experience for newcomers nicer (that is the goal anyway).
Note that nodejs/LESS is not part of the Composite C1 core - it is installed as a separate package if you choose a starter site that uses LESS.
You do not need Visual Studio to use Composite C1. We actually put extra effort into making sure you do not need Visual Studio. That is why we bring our own LESS compiler for instance. Some find website development unthinkable without VS, some find VS to be a horror of expensive bloat. We try to make both groups happy.
What we could do better is probably a lot of things, but in this context we could perhaps fall back to already generated .css files (when they exist) if the .less compiler will not launch. Since we already do this "publish" burningice suggests automatically (a changed .less files is instantly re-compiled and cached on disk on first request), this could make life easier in more situations. Other ideas are welcome as well :)
You can use Composite C1 without having LESS (node js) support on you hosting environment. Getting this to work is extra work (compared to just installing a Starter Site) and it is probably a pretty annoying thing to have to go through, but basically you just need to change the css includes in the html from .less to .css (and make those css files using your favorite text editor).
If you run the site locally and have perfect nodejs/LESS support, you will find the CSS files gets generated for you on disk next to the .LESS files. Here you simply need to update your template html and change .less to .css and you can FTP away.
The reason we rely heavily on LESS in our starter sites is that they make skinning/theming crazy much cooler and the cost (fewer hosting setups will fully support us) kind of makes sense, since we get to make the Composite C1 experience for newcomers nicer (that is the goal anyway).
Note that nodejs/LESS is not part of the Composite C1 core - it is installed as a separate package if you choose a starter site that uses LESS.
You do not need Visual Studio to use Composite C1. We actually put extra effort into making sure you do not need Visual Studio. That is why we bring our own LESS compiler for instance. Some find website development unthinkable without VS, some find VS to be a horror of expensive bloat. We try to make both groups happy.
What we could do better is probably a lot of things, but in this context we could perhaps fall back to already generated .css files (when they exist) if the .less compiler will not launch. Since we already do this "publish" burningice suggests automatically (a changed .less files is instantly re-compiled and cached on disk on first request), this could make life easier in more situations. Other ideas are welcome as well :)