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commented
3 years ago Another potential purpose of Bootstrap Lite (and the one that brought me to use it) is that there are ~100,000 D7 sites built on Drupal Bootstrap; this theme provides a Backdrop migration path without having to start from scratch. It's particularly useful since default Backdrop themes like Basis use Bootstrap 4, and mixing BS3/BS4 can be problematic.
I've just taken over maintaining this theme, because I think it could be a very strong(er) contribution to the theme space for Backdrop CMS and it hasn't gotten any attention for a long time. With the inclusion of the Bootswatch themes, it also helps us with some of the goals we've defined for the Ready 2 Wear initiative. (Bootswatch feature has been broken in recent releases).
The last release for this theme was in Dec 2016. This theme is already the most popular theme for Backdrop CMS, despite the numerous bugs that made it difficult to use out of the box.
My goals for this theme are to make it much more useful out of the box, without a sub-theme. But, I think it might also be very nice to have a starter kit included with this theme for those who intend to sub-theme it.
Here is are some ways to help.
1) Bug reports and pull requests. Help me identify things that are broken and not usable out of the box. Let's get these simple things fixed.
2) Help with the structure of the theme. I'd love feedback from experienced front-end developers on how to improve the bones of this theme, that could include rewriting CSS if necessary.
3) Help defining the purpose of "Bootstrap Lite" or the mission statement. Since taking over this theme, I'm not sure exactly the role intended by the original maintainer. However, based upon the name alone of the theme and it's condition upon taking it over, it was my impression that it is intended to be a relatively light weight theme good for sub-theming. Based upon the inclusion of Bootswatch, I think it must also have been intended to be useful out of the box for simple sites. I assume that the intention is to rely on Bootstrap as much as possible with as few overrides as possible. Does this make sense?
The versioning of this theme is a little unusual for Backdrop projects. I don't see many BETA releases listed on BackdropCMS.org. But, since there are a number of obvious bugs and past versions have been listed as BETA, I'm going to stick with that designation now to indicate that it's not entirely stable. I went ahead and cut a new release with some simple css fixes to problems that seemed pretty obvious to me. I think that this theme is much more usable today than it was yesterday, but there are still some easy to find problems that need attention.
I hope to get a stable version 1.x out very soon and then focus any larger changes on a version 2.x, so folks can use 1.x without fear of breaking.
I welcome your input.