Many times I’ve attempted to stream-line my development processes in a variety of different ways, using 960gs, Eric Mayer’s reset.css, HTML5 Boilerplate, to mention only a few. One of my favourite time-savers is to create an ‘interface template’ this template usually takes the form of a single page with every UI element that I’m likely to need to build the website. This helps to ensure that all components ‘play nice’ with each other.
During this process I often find myself using the same markup with the same class names, for example my pagination nearly always ends up exactly the same HTML and CSS with different styles. After a while I noticed a number of tricks and techniques were also being repeated. This included CSS to style buttons exactly the same if the markup used was an anchor, button or input. Then a number of styles to make the button appear disabled, negative, positive and neutral, then I’d usually include classes to make them large, medium and small.
Think in your mind that dreamy type of music to set the scene….
“Wouldn’t it be great if these techniques were available to implement at the beginning of a project with a way of modifying them to suit the design of the website I’m building them for.”
While this is still a distant “I may get round to doing something one day” thought. Along comes Bootstrap from Twitter. A set of tools put together by @mdo and @fat (from Twitter) which takes this concept by the short and curlies and provides a full set of amazingness, especially if the things I describe above are familiar to you.
A grid system, typography, lists, tables, forms, buttons, tabs, pagination, page messages, modals, tool-tips, popovers are all included, which is so amazingly comprehensive I am overwhelmed!
Wait, there’s more! ‘Really?’ I hear you say. No, there’s actually Less. Combining all this Bootstrap awesome with the power of Less is nothing short of genius. It would have been great without it but so so so much better as part of the deployment. You can get really funky with mixins and all that jazz.
As you can see, my blog is a bit of a shambles, with no styling of any note. It’s all because I like to tinker with the source code of my themes. I enjoy dipping into the world of WordPress every now and then as it feels more of a hobby than the java that I’m exposed to on a daily basis.
My intention is to implement Bootstrap from Twitter into a WordPress theme as it simply feels like the right thing to do, then make it available for download. Watch this space… Please get in contact (or comment on this post) if you have the same intentions and would like to help out and keep up the motivation to get something released pretty soon.
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