Looking into Bootstrap 3

First, I gotta say I love Bootstrap Toolkit. It saved my ass many times by showing me the way to create simple UIs with CSS and JavaScript.

Bootstrap is turning into the coral reef I hoped it would when I got on board. There's Font Awesome, a great collection of icons in a Bootstrap-friendly font. And recently we discovered and immediately employed Bootswatch, a collection of Bootstrap templates. All you have to do is replace the Bootstrap CSS file with one of theirs and you get a different font and color scheme, designed by people who know what they're doing.

Now Bootstrap 3 is coming. It's at Release Candidate stage.

I've started to do a little investigation into how compatible Bootstrap 3 is with version 2, and it appears to require a fairly complete overhaul. I'm not looking forward to doing this work. I have so many other things to deal with, and I like to take some time off every once in a while as well.

A caveat from the Bootswatch developers: "Bootstrap 3.0 represents a complete break from the 2.x API, which means that the updated themes will not be compatible with old Bootstrap markup."

Luckily we can stay with Bootstrap 2 until the time is right for us. We just have to make copies of the files we use and put them on our server. Which we have done. I'm going to copy the Bootswatch template files today and make the changes to the software to use them in their new location. (Update: This change was made.)

I've also added a macro to the global glossary, <%useBootstrap3%>, which you can add to your Fargo templates in place of <%useBootstrap%>, and you'll be using the new version. However be aware that many things will not work with the new Bootstrap.


Posted: Mon, 05 Aug 2013 13:02:35 GMT