Hey,
Im just wondering if many of you guys are using the Twitter Bootstrap framework for development? I was introduced to it last week and it seems great, just wondering if many are using it in actual design/development for clients?
We’ve had a few posts in here where people have trouble with it … as with other frameworks. My question would be, Why do you need it? It doesn’t offer anything you can’t do yourself. The advantage of doing it yourself is that you don’t have a lot of redundant code that you don’t understand or need. It may seem quicker to use a framework, but things slow down when it doesn’t work the way you want and you get bogged down in trying to tweak a whole bunch of confusing code you didn’t write yourself. Anyhow, that’s how I look at it. 
Ive messed about with it quite a bit and havent had any problems or found it difficult to use at all. We were told about it in our prototyping class last week, I think the main attraction is how fast a working prototype could be put together with bootstrap in comparison to having to style all the forms and buttons yourself. I also think that the responsive 12 column grid is extremely handy if nothing else… Would save alot of time hand programming responsiveness… When i was messing about with it, rather than going in and changing the CSS provided i simply linked to a style.css and used @import to import the bootstrap css sheets, then listed any new rules i wanted to either change or add in that sheet… I dunno i really like it but was just wondering what the general concensus was with it on a web design forum
I am using it right now to redesign our website to be responsive. I find it very easy to use IF combined with Firefox’s FireBug program. With Firebug you just click on any part of the webpage you are working on and it tells you exactly what HTML and CSS is effecting it. Then you just alter that code until you get the look you want.
Writing all your own code is great for the pro’s - but Bootstrap and FireBug is a great way for the rest of us to learn while creating good sites
Bootstrap is a beast. However, this is my approach to it though. I have never been into frameworks but I gave bootstrap a shot and it is a beast and you won’t use all of it. I did however spend hours playing with portions of it and taking apart what was applicable to me and removing unnecessary IE * hacks. In the process I learned a lot. The end result was that I was able to create a “template”, not so much a framework for my projects.
Less is really useful in this though. So I know that pretty much every project I have will use form elements, navigation, search (since I do a lot of Wordpress - so that context worked for me).
I was able to pare it down to a template that had basic resets and styles for forms, nav and search etc… combine it with Less, I could tweak either rounded corners or not, borders, colours etc for all of these elements in just 3 lines or so and I did not have to reinvent the wheel for each project.
This approach might not work for everyone but I would say, at the very least, studying Bootstrap will do you a lot of good and maybe spark some ideas on how you can do it better.
My only caution is that you do not use it as is. You can tell a Bootstrap site by looking at it and that is a result of someone just using Bootstrap as opposed to adapting it.
You can customize your bootstrap download to only have what you need and nothing more. That saves you the time from having to hand-code all of that in yourself and makes it very light file-wise. As for Bootstrap-built sites looking like they were built with Bootstrap, that’s likely due to the user installing it as-is, and not designing the site out at all. Bootstrap is a framework, not a theme.
hi I am working in cakephp framework and as i am familiar with the twitter-bootstrap and heard a new word bootsmetro which is similar to it i think so can anyone explain me both concepts?