Twitter Bootstrap with themes, enhancements, and other goodies | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Bootstrap with themes, enhancements, and other goodies

ajkochanowicz.github.com

152 pointswillfarrell34 comments

Jesus this is ugly. The whole point of Bootstrap is that it's super easy for anyone to make a visually non-jarring website. Bootstrap effectively democratises good design basics on the web. What this is doing is precisely the opposite.

Yeah, it doesn't feel clean and solid. Appreciate the effort from the makers, but the result is not appealing at all.

Honestly, I think it's more of a color-scheme and element spacing problem than a real failed twitter-bootstrap experience...

I'm always intrigued by the concept but then I visit the site and want to have nothing to do with it. Awful colors, fugly fonts, can't read some of the gray type, weird space between "Using LESS" and "Examples", undisclosed Bootswap usage, barely disclosed HTML5Boilerplate usage, unclear WrapBootstrap relationship, etc.

Don't forget the "Kickstrap Only" OLCG on the Scaffolding page. It misses the point of Bootstrap's fluid nesting that does a much better demo of the same functionality halfway down the page.

Yes, concept is good, but, with respect to the author, the themes are not appealing at all.

May as well plug this here as well.. Drag / Drop form builder for bootstrap.. http://bootstrap-forms.heroku.com

Thanks Adam - that's just lessened my form building pain considerably

Great! The javascript is a bit rough but it puts the bits in the right place!

Very impressed with that, thanks for sharing!

Thanks for sharing.

In case anyone else is looking... https://github.com/minikomi/Bootstrap-Form-Builder

Love it! thank you

Very useful.

Another tip to add to this is to create snippets or keyboard shortcuts for this. So "textfield" expands into the HTML code for "text input" on tab key, "submit" expands to "form action submit", etc. If you work with notepad++ then Fingertext works great with this. Saved me a so much time and typing!

Quick review:

The CS3 animations and the Chosen form input plugin look pretty slick. I don't see the new icons being that big an upgrade over Glyphicons. The performance stuff seems like stuff I'd rather set up on its own rather than as part of my design framework.

These guys should provide instructions for "Kickstrap-izing" existing bootstrap sites rather than just how to create a Kickstrap site from scratch. Having already invested a bunch of time into getting a bootstrap site set up, I'm more likely to cherry pick from this than use the whole thing.

The word "Kickstrapizing" made me throw up in my mouth a little.

I was a bit put off as well. I'd prefer the term kickstrapping.

Also, an observation about marketing copy: The main headline for Kickstrap describes it as Twitter bootstrap with "with themes, enhancements, and other goodies."

This doesn't tell me how I benefit from using it over bootstrap or another framework. I had to spend 15 minutes reading their site trying to figure that out.

A better line might be "Twitter bootstrap with more icons, animations, and 5x the page performance."

I didn't see the 5x page performance claim, and I've looked for it. Care to point me to it ?

>These guys should provide instructions for "Kickstrap-izing" existing bootstrap sites

They do, on the github README.md [1], under Install:

If you already have a Bootstrap installation running, drop the /extras folder into your Bootstrap root. Drag the sample_index.html file in /extras to your Bootstrap root and /extras/css/bootstrap(.min).css wherever you have your existing bootstrap.css file. It should be linked and ready to go. (If you already have HTML files you want to use, see "Advanced Setup" below.

1. https://github.com/ajkochanowicz/kickstrap/

Looks like this uses themes from over here: http://bootswatch.com/

OLCG: "For example, you may want to split a div with a "span8" class into three. However, 8 is not cleanly divisible by three."

Kickstrap has implemented One Line CSS Grid for this case which could just as easily be handled by making the row fluid with three span4s. Or am I missing something?

Nope, you're not missing anything. row-fluid resets the grid, allowing you to pretty much arbitrarily dice up your columns however you want.

This would be a good time to introduce keerthana-bootstap:

https://github.com/zachrose/keerthana-bootstap/

It's the complete opposite, for people who want to learn how to make webpages.

I think the JavaScript console is a pretty steep requirement for someone who is learning how to change the color of text.

Themes with Twitter Bootstrap are a double-edged sword. On one hand, the themes add diversity to the visual design of bootstrap sites, which tend to rely on the default styles. You can frequently spot a bootstrap site a mile away because it features the black gradient header bar and Helvetica for the body copy. On the other hand, themes provide more options for being lazy with your site's look, as opposed to taking the time to tailor styles to your match your product/brand/content. Bootstrap is supposed to help you get a decent site up faster, but it shouldn't do all of the styling for you.

Previous discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3794885

I like the idea a lot. I'm not a fan of most of the themes, especially the one being used for the site itself. But the classic Bootstrap theme is starting to look quite plain (which is a good thing to be able to say about the web, mind you), and I'd like to see a few other solid options emerge.

Hi folks, thanks for all the comments and helpful criticisms. In order to best respond to this, I've published a document answering many of your questions for now.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4228989

Thanks,

Adam Kochanowicz

Um, this is the exact same guy, repurposing his site and reposting it to HN.

All of these are his:

https://wrapbootstrap.com/ http://ajkochanowicz.github.com/Kickstrap/themes.html http://bootswatch.com/ http://builtwithbootstrap.com/

All the same themes. This shit hits HN every few weeks.

WrapBootstrap guy here. Only WrapBootstrap is mine. Each of those are owned by different people. In fact they're all members of HN.

Ah ok. But they all seem to offer the same themes

I'll try to clear it up:

- Kickstrap is a complete fork of Bootstrap that uses Bootswatch for its themes

- Bootswatch is CSS themes that are drop-in replacements for the default Bootstrap styles

- Built With Bootstrap is a gallery of sites using Bootstrap for their designs

- WrapBootstrap (my site) is a marketplace for Bootstrap-based templates

The fact that they've included HTML5 Boilerplate is nice. I use them together so frequently that I rolled my own solution not too long ago: https://github.com/brianchitester/hotplate

Have you gotten the H5BP build script to work with Bootstrap? Last I tried it would error and exit on some of the Bootstrap files.

Typo on the front page: "Javscript plugins"

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