Twitter Bootstrap Generator | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Bootstrap Generator

martinbean.co.uk

247 pointsbravolima48 comments

After playing around with Bootstrap, I realized what a huge boon it was to my projects (programmer lacking in design skills). One thing I like about it is I don't have to pick colors. It does the border, button, text, and nav-bar colors for me. I don't trust myself to pick my own colors! I would really like a way to preview or be able to pick some other colors other people have made. Maybe you could expose a perma-link to a set of config options so they are easy to share.

I'm also amazed at how often I spot it now. Seems like it's everywhere.

Agreed, I use it in all my projects now and it is a huge time saver. If nothing else, not having to futz around with form elements more than makes up for the added overhead.

I second the entire comment -- well, excluding the programmer lacking design skills.

As a developer with a decent amount of design skills, what I love is that their defaults are extremely easy to customise and extend where necessary.

> I'm also amazed at how often I spot it now. Seems like it's everywhere.

I also see it everywhere, which is the main impetus for me to come up with a completely customised version that reflects my design style. Hopefully more people do the same instead of just using it straight off of a clone.

I suspect we will see a wave of "skins" released for it soon.

I'm creating a library of design patterns for BS, so ping me if you want to be included.

EDIT: I'm sorry I don't have a signup list yet! Just email me at my HN username at gmail and I'll send out an alert that way.

Do you have a public repo?

Unfortunately no, not yet, I'm still abstracting out the themes from a few recent side projects and wanted to clean things up before posting anywhere.

would love to be included. Would be cool also if you could allow users just plug in any palette from www.colourlovers.com or patterns from subtlepatterns.com which would add quick/mass customization of a site and really simple/sweet A/B testing.

Ha, Darius from colourlovers was one of the first people I tested the idea out on over breakfast a few weeks back and he really warmed up to it, especially considering the ambitious marketplace he's building now:

http://creativemarket.com

And subtlepatterns kicks ass, it's been my secret designer weapon ever since it came out.

post it to HN once it's ready )

Absolutely! Definitely inspired by all the Bootstrap activity I've been seeing here lately. Here's another one - a form builder based on Bootstrap and jquery:

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3442883

If you need a responsive grid with a similar aesthetic, check out Zurb's Foundation: http://foundation.zurb.com

It isn't as fully featured, but is a great, simple alternative that works well on mobile also.

I believe bootstrap will be adding a responsive grid with bootstrap 2.0, currently being developed in the 2.0-wip branch.

http://bootstrap.io/Demo/Scaffolding

Yep, responsiveness is the main feature of 2.0. Arguably not as responsive as other frameworks though as it doesn't use percentage widths to gradually scale columns. For a given width range, the column widths are fixed.

Use sites like http://www.colourlovers.com/ to get inspiration for colors. If you are a programmer you should spend some time studying the color theory - much of it is based on math and you can actually often calculate which colors will work together.

I am all over bootstrap. My both sites http://www.mockuptiger.com and https://www.wireframes.org are done with bootstrap

I will be converting my other sites all to bootstrap. But with slight color changes it can provide a difference but consistency

I totally agree. I've been wondering for 15 years why every website has to have a special custom design anyway. With native apps, custom design almost always works against them, as opposed to the OS's default, familiar design.

Maybe in the future, something like Bootstrap will become the default way that web browsers render websites, and we can just get rid of most of the boilerplate CSS.

I am really not trying to stir a pot here. I am truly looking to learn. But the whole idea of bootstrap seems to go against other stuff I used to read about how to use css. I understood that your markup should be semantic and detached from you layout and style as much as possible. But when you use the bootstrap grid to arrange your page, you are absolutely mixing content and layout.

For me, I always thought actually fully separating markup and layout/styling was a pipe dream, and unless you're going to absolutely fill your page with id's and classes (a la zen garden) and spend enormous time tweaking things, then a major overhaul will require changing markup anyway, so why bother? But that seemed to fly in the face of advice I was reading. But using a grid seems to fly in the face of that old advice too. So what's the deal? Do people no longer think markup and styling/layout should be separated? Or was I just misinterpreting what I read in the past?

It's still a good idea to separate markup and styling. In the interest of getting things that look decent out the door quickly it's often necessary to postpone ideological purity.

If your idea proves successful then over time you will need to evolve away from bootstrap anyway, and you can get cleaner markup and style along the way.

If your idea proves unsuccessful, good thing you didn't waste too much time on a pure semantic markup.

Right - grids are basically table-based layout with credibility.

Still, the clue is in the name. "Bootstrap" your app, then faff it into pure web standards over time, should the app prove popular.

Less time wasted on an app you don't know will fly.

There's an entire ecosystem coalescing around Bootstrap and I love it. It's the framework for the coders who are design challenged. I know more and more people like me who are incorporating it in every project they build. In time it will raise the minimum level design bar for the entire web.

This is great. You should add a color picker to the text field boxes.

Cool idea, in addition to the color picker you might want to let it change the current page live via DOM manipulation so you can see what it will look like before you download it.

This is nice, but why not just use the variables in variables.less? That's what they are there for.

What? No top bar customization? That is the biggest giveaway for Bootstrap and the easiest way to differentiate your site.

Once you add that then you'll have something super useful. I've customized the top bar color for a few different sites and it is a bit painful. (there was an open bug about making it easier, haven't checked it lately though)

just to clarify, I didn't create the generator. I saw it on the bootstrap google group:

http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-bootstrap/browse_thre...

The author wrote it in one evening which makes it even more impressive.

Great. If you can add customization of top bar, it would be awesome. Thanks for creating this tool.

Very nice, being able to see the CSS applied to some generic HTML before downloading would be cool too! Thanks for the nice work.

Definitely! And also maybe include the base HTML file.

I don't get it. What does this tool accomplish that isn't accomplished by putting the collected color definitions in a second style sheet and "cascading" it with the standard bootstrap.css? (I'm really asking not being sarcastic.)

A lot of people can't/don't use LESS, which means that a lot of precompiled rules have to be overriden in a tiresome way. For instance if you change the grid sizes you have to adjust a couple different CSS attributes. This tool generates everything in a precomputed easy to digest manner.

"No ending semi-colon is required." seems like a detail that could be handled behind the scenes.

This is pretty cool.

That said, a Bootstrap generator that generates LESS, which in turn generates CSS? Seems overengineered. Almost all of these variables are in variables.less anyway. I'd hope that anyone setting up Bootstrap has the skills to edit this one file.

https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/blob/master/lib/variabl...

Isn't that a bit like saying your refactoring IDE which generates some high-level language which in turn generates machine code is over-engineered?

If you can afford to be working with a bit of a moving target, don't waste your time with the current version of BS. The 2.0-wip branch is vastly more improved.

Excellent stuff! You may want to keep an eye out as Bootstrap 2 is probably going to come out any day now if the Issues tracker on Github is any indicator.

Great work Martin! Such a simple tool that makes Bootstrap more available to everyone - not just those of blessed with Less skills ;)

If you do build anything using Bootstrap, please feel free to submit to Built With Bootstrap:

http://builtwithbootstrap.com/submit

I would like a pre-set color palette option

This is awesome! But I want to be able to save my preferences on it, either by permalinking them (useful-ish) OR in localStorage (better) or both (whoa yeah party)

So it could have a 'save to localStorage' button, then a list of your previous saved configurations in a side panel?

Excellent work!

Also - is the bootstrap generator on github?

Using Rails and Twitter Bootstrap? Check out this extraction I put together from a personal project that makes it super easy to generate Bootstrap-style forms: https://github.com/potenza/form-bootstrap

A huge benefit to this tool would be instant change feedback. Specifically, given that this site uses bootstrap, it would be nice to see the changes you put in to the various input fields change the css settings for the editor itself.

SASS & LESS formats maybe?

Source Code would be nice. I wish to hack it a bit.

a nice addition would be a disable button. For example, I never use the grids. Otherwise, great work!

Awesome job!

I've found Bootstrap to be best employed as a basic framework for what I would call working applications where the user is required to perform many repetitive tasks on the application throughout their work day. It lends itself very well for dashboards, admin consoles, backoffice and reporting tools, etc. And Twitter, of course. I would use the most very basic scaffolding (containers, rows and spans) for a marketing site, but it's also extremely helpful for producing working wireframes.

To whit, over the past two weeks I completely redid a support application using Bootstrap and my output CSS totals ~250 lines, whereas before it was somewhere around ~2600 when it was all said and done. My current .js file has two functions in it. I think we've found a winner here.

Another benefit is that a developer not well-versed in the front-end is easily able to build a basic, functioning front-end to an app with small learning curve, and I'm going to assume that they'll be able to work on an app that already has it. Or so I hope, because after twelve years, I'm a little sick and tired of writing said code.

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