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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

I've worked on several projects that used Bootstrap to great effect and others where it was probably a mistake.

On the projects where it didn't work well, there were stakeholders who kept insisting on "little" tweaks.

On the projects where it worked, the stakeholders said "that looks awesome" on the first cut.

Not surprisingly, the projects where the stakeholders were happy with generic Bootstrap were the ones that ended up looking and functioning better, in my opinion.

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Exactly my experience as well. Let's use a grid and the bootstrap elements! designs come in without grid in mind, and no bootstrap elements

Though I do agree with the article in some respects. Bootstrap can be a bloat on a heavily designed site. You end up only using the grid for instance, and there are lighter weight frameworks for that.

Bootstrap is a godsend to strapped IT departments with no designers backing them though. Can really break the old schoolers out of table based layouts and nice pretty buttons quickly.

I leaned more heavily on Bootstrap when initially wrapping my head around RWD, but now that it has "clicked" in my brain, I'll be switching off of Bootstrap to something smaller. Bourbon and Neat more than likely, but I do need to look into Pure CSS too.

This is my experience as well. If people want little tweaks and you're using a CSS framework, you're going to have a bad time.

OTOH Bootstrap's grid system is almost a must have when I'm writing a responsive application. There have been a few projects where I've ripped out the non-grid parts of BS because that was all I wanted.

I did exactly the same for almost every project I started. Just extract the grid, vendor-prefixes and a few other generic rules for alignment and you're set.

The only wish I could make is a "simplified" responsive menus/navbars, so it would be easier to build on top of that after.

Have you tried building your own grid system or importing "just" a grid-system/mix-ins which generate grid and columns?

I have, and every time I do, I basically end up trying to rebuild Bootstrap's grid. It has 4 screen sizes that cascade so you can set a small size and not explicitly declare that you want larger screens to be the same, responsive and adaptive resizing, offset columns, push/pull (this is hard, and necessary if you need to change the order of elements based on size), and BS4's alpha adds opt-in flexbox.

Regarding push/pull, Bootstrap is the only grid system I've used that has had this. The use case is when you want

    [x] [y] [z]

on desktop to be

    [z]
    [y]
    [x]

on mobile.

Pretty much. For me, I think bootstrap comes out ahead even the projects that wanted to tweak everything. It gets a little messy, but not as messy as building from scratch.

Projects that allow you to work within bootstrap's limitations and simply tweak the colors and other basics are a dream come true and wind up looking great. Not design award grade artistic, but functionally very good in a way that's not hard to look at.

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