Mastering Bootstrap
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- cardeo
Hi, I launched my Mastering Bootstrap eBook today. It's a guide to creating and selling Bootstrap themes, take a look if you have a minute
- detritus0
What's the lowest weight 'production-ready' Bootstrap theme you've seen? They all seem to start off weighing an absolute fuck-tonne out of the box.
- cardeo0
Yes, they are heavy but by design. If you're looking for something really lightweight, Bootstrap might not be the best option for you. If you're looking for a rich component library then it's perfect
- Continuity0
Well, the nice thing about Bootstrap is you can strip away everything you don't need, keep the stuff you do ... and then do a (shock! surprise!) custom design around it, instead of getting a bloated generic theme that everyone's seen before anyway.
- detritus0
Yes, quite — I was fishing for alternatives, I guess.
I've been hovering around http://responsivebp.com/ which does what you suggest, Continuity, out of the box.
- Continuity0
Ah, right, got it.
I wasn't actually taking the piss out of you. Just railing against themes in general.
- No problem, why are you against theming?
cardeo - I'm against it because it's the easy way out. There's nothing that makes a site stand out with a pre-made purchased theme.Continuity
- No problem, why are you against theming?
- dijitaq0
if you want to restyle it, the bootstrap css preprocessor (less or sass) is your friend.
- cardeo0
I actually wrote a blog post tonight on how to create a library of LESS variables to speed up the theming process, check it at:
- detritus0
The issue is the filesize.
I was fart-arsing around with a few mobile frameworks over the weekend for a wee site I'm doing — Bootstrap was, out of the box and tweaked (but with zero design work applied) already weighing in at 100kb.
I imagine there are a lot of people who deploy that straight away and don't even consider what the implications of a 1/2Mb filesize site are.. especially when it's an ostensibly 'mobile-first' framework.
I ended up starting from scratch with http://purecss.io/, so now have a site which, JS and images aside (ie. html, css includes and a font), weighs less than 100kb.
- sorry - booststrap was already weighing ~400Kb - just the CSS files alone were weighing close to 100Kb.detritus
- cardeo0
If you break it down to the minified css and js files it's only ~150kb. I think that's a worthwhile trade off for what you get, no?
side note, released a free wordpress theme with bootstrap integration tonight, grab it from github
- detritus0
Sorry, what do you get for that — someone else's minimal theme (and I mean, minimal - that's just a CSS file that 'tidies up' HTML) and the barest start of a JS library?
And then — how much effort does it take to strip down BS to that size?
Personally, i think that's a pretty bad start to a website. Makes more sense to add-in functionality where needed, rather than strip away at a convoluted hodgepodge.
I've not got anything against Bootstrap per se, but when it's used as the foundation for otherwise simplistic mobile sites, by people whose idea of web design is 'adding and then perhaps tweaking a theme', I think you end up with a solution that wholly undermines it's raison d'etre from the off.
BS is good for teaching people good practice, standardisation, responsive mobile techniques and then acting as a prototyping boilerplate.
Imho, it is NOT a production boilerplate, especially for mobile.
But what do I know? I'm old and past it and all the young kids' standards are different and weird and wrong...
- I think it does a bit more than tidying up HTML. If you've worked on a product that your users have to customize, it gives them a starting point they may be familiar with, if not, there's tons of documentation on it. Also, being a modular framework is a huge advantage
cardeo
- I think it does a bit more than tidying up HTML. If you've worked on a product that your users have to customize, it gives them a starting point they may be familiar with, if not, there's tons of documentation on it. Also, being a modular framework is a huge advantage
- detritus0
Sort of reminds me of that daft-ass 'blank' font that Adobe (I think?) thought was a clever answer to the problem of text flash on sites where an external font face is loaded-in.
Except it weighed 60-80Kb or something, so all it did was make the fucking text-flash longer.
Beggars belief, shit like that, it really does.
- sem0
No bad jokes about shoe laces, velcro and such...oh ok, I see we're being serious today. Ok, I guess I'll just erm...just go to Reddit I suppose?
Well done though on le book good sir.
- Hombre_Lobo0
For lightweight alternatives to bootstrap, some of you qbn folk might be interested in http://jeet.gs
- You've used it?
Will look in-to.. thanks!detritus - sorry dude havent used it, but seen it mentioned on a couple of forums in a good light. looks cool!Hombre_Lobo
- You've used it?
- cardeo0
Personally, I didn't believe in Bootstrap until I actually started using it on a daily basis and it really won me over