Frontend Research: Bootstrap

[itsthejoker]

Epic: #8

This issue exists to discuss the above framework.

Bootstrap:

Pros:

• themes
• well-documented
• stable
• large community
• easy to get started

Cons:

• slightly older, slightly dated appearance
• large -- ~270kb

[itsthejoker]

This is the option I'm personally most familiar with and can bang out the most code in; even though it has a bit of slightly dated feel to it, it's still fast and easy to run (especially when paired with something like jquery and / or preact).

[perryprog]

I personally would rather not use Bootstrap — It has a very similar look across webpages, that often doesn't look that nice.

[itsthejoker]

I agree about the look thing, but something else I forgot to write last night is that it also handles transitions between desktop and mobile much easier.

[DavidArchibald]

I'm surprised you didn't mention themes in the pros.

P.S. I linked the paid official ones, but there are free ones.

[itsthejoker]

We can have the nonprofit purchase a theme if we wanted to go that route; not a big issue.

[itsthejoker]

I quite like this one, and it's free; the Pro version is nicer, but buying a theme for $70 would pretty much blow out our bank account. https://github.com/creativetimofficial/now-ui-kit

[itsthejoker]

Someone who was reading this conversation reached out to me privately and offered to pay for part of the cost of the now-ui-kit-pro theme, should we want to go for it. Personally, I think it looks amazing but first we need to decide if bootstrap is indeed right for us.

https://demos.creative-tim.com/now-ui-kit-pro/index.html

[perryprog]

Wow, that looks amazing. I'm all for going for it then, I guess.

[itsthejoker]

Okay, let's plan on using Bootstrap 4. I'll keep this open for a bit so we can find out what's happening with the theme; I sent an email to the folks over at Creative Tim to see if they'd be interested in / willing to do a sponsorship (because on further reading I'm not sure if we're supposed to buy the $70 license or the $280 license 😱). We'll see what they have to say.

[TheLonelyGhost]

I just popped in to say bootstrap does not exactly promote the most semantic of markup. divs nested in more divs inside of more divs and you might dig deep enough to see some content.

Foundation (ZURB) is much more modular about it and my personal preference, though a lot harder to find a good design. If someone can find a good visual design, it’s relatively straightforward to reimplement things with Foundation and it frees us up a lot more for front-end JS frameworks.

[TheLonelyGhost]

If you’re looking for themes in general there’s also html5up.net for a very good price.

[itsthejoker]

I'm very happy to say that Creative Tim has offered to sponsor us and will be providing a Developer license to UI Kit Pro!