It's popular because design is hard. Seriously hard. And the skills required to code up a cool web application do not often overlap with the skills required to make a site that isn't hideous to look at.
Bootstrap allows you to have a permanent check on the "design site" in your list of things to do for launch.
Not only does it look great out of the box, but it's also a great starting point for real designs (hence the name "bootstrap"). http://builtwithbootstrap.com/
At this point in its adoption curve, using Bootstrap is amateur. It says I have no idea how to style a webpage. Yes, it makes things look "attractive", but because it so popular, using Bootstrap on a website creates a site with no identity because it looks identical to the 100,000 other sites that use it.
Aside from creating designs with no soul, Bootstrap enforces a model where people without design expertise are supposed to be somehow be good enough at design to utilize these UI components effectively.
If you are not good enough to design a website, what makes you good enough to understand the appropriate time to use a component or when not to?
Hacker News itself has a very hand rolled UI and it works great. If it got Bootstrapped it would be a drastic step backwards. It just isn't the right solution for a lot of sites. It's design overkill.
Again, I think Bootstrap is cool, but I would never use it. I don't consider myself a designer, but I'm not okay with working on things that look like everyone else. Simple + handrolled > Bootstrap.
There's nothing that can save you from having bad taste. However, given good taste and not-so-great artistry, Bootstrap is a web developer's best friend, specially if you're looking for contract work or launching your v1 app. And even with bad taste, there are sufficient examples out there to steal, err, get inspiration from.
> I'm not okay with working on things that look like everyone else does.
You're suffering from selection bias as an HN reader visiting other hackers' websites and such who have heard of Bootstrap. The greater extent of the world has not seen Bootstrap, and if they have, isn't it better for them to experience something decent looking?
> Simple and handrolled > Bootstrap.
If you have the chops sure, but a good number of hackers do not have taste, and less have the artistic talent.
That's an important point to digest. Just because something looks nice doesn't mean it's effective. It may be the opposite.
Sure, the website looks "nice", I guess, but is that the goal? Or is the goal of the site to get sign ups, generate referrals, make money, etc?
When you're done plugging in Bootstrap, does the design serve your goals? Or does it just look nice? Have you saved time or merely punted the design farther down the road?
Again, I'm playing Devil's advocate because I do see the value in Bootstrap. I just rarely hear any contrary opinions on Bootstrap and it's important to understand (or at least discuss) the trade offs in using a canned design.
Bootstrap really helps with stuff like that because it does a lot of heavy lifting for you (styled content, scaffolding, themed buttons, etc) and allows you to fiddle with that stuff to get the effect that you want while still making everything line up.
Now make no mistake about it people can still design awesome sites with nothing and people can definitely design terrible sites with bootstrap it's just that the bar for terrible is a little harder to reach if someone is holding your hand.
Also with regards to the whole "everything looks canned" I think that's largely a part of being on a site where bootstrap is very popular. I know I used a lot of bootstrap sites before I knew what it was and I was none the wiser but now that I used it too I see it everywhere.
If i know my site needs some thumbnails a navbar, icons and a nice font, I'd rather avoid recreating the wheel.
it's almost the Rails of HTML/CSS UI design
It also can be used as a specification for markup. The markup required for Bootstrap's form-horizontal is kind of ugly, but if everybody uses it than it becomes much easier to move form CSS from one project to another.
Similar to how, if I go to a website and I notice it's using Apache or nginx, I write them off as not having any idea how to write a web server, and that's something I look for from an application or service provider.
ie: you could still use Bootstrap to style a WordPress site.
CMSs manage your content usually through a database, and most of them provide a way to display that content in a structured format. See Wordpress and Drupal. WYSIWYG is not a necessary part of a CMS.
Bootstrap is a (mostly) css library to help provide a better front end development experience for a web site/app. It can be used with the front-facing portion of a CMS or any other kind of site.
Right, a CMS lets you implement an architecture for HTML and CSS, e.g. Bootstrap.