Show HN: Find a Bootstrap theme for your next project | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Find a Bootstrap theme for your next project

bootstrapcarnival.com

78 pointsbharani_m25 comments

I've been working with Bootstrap for a couple of months now and I have noticed that it is pretty difficult to filter through all the free and premium templates available for Bootstrap. You usually have to wade through fancy cover images and screenshots.

I have created Bootstrap Carnival to make theme discovery a bit easier. It instantly shows you the demos of over 1000+ premium Bootstrap themes from multiple marketplaces (WrapBootstrap, Creative Market and Themeforest).

Let me know what you think about it.

I like it, quite useful to be able to quickly preview the themes without having to wade through the description pages.

One thing that would make it much better (at least for me) would be the ability to filter by marketplace. Creative Market is by far my favorite because of their license terms (much better than Themeforest or WrapBootstrap).

Thanks. Glad that you like it.

> Creative Market is by far my favorite because of their license terms

Yes, I love how easy it is to set up a shop with Creative Market. I hate the exclusive product/author terms in ThemeForest and WrapBootstrap.

You can search for "Creative Market" to find themes from that marketplace.

I was just looking for a Bootstrap template, so you hit my little pain point at exactly the right time. I'll spend some more serious review time on it in a bit, but at a glance I was a little overwhelmed by the looks. It isn't too bloated with features, but for some reason the layout made my brain think it was at a glance. Again, I'll play more thoroughly later.

Drop me a line at bharani[at]bootstrapcarnival.com with your feedback once your review it. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Sorry to hijack, but I literally just launched something very similar:

http://www.themebeacon.com/

I even posted about it to HN the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7888745) but it seemed to vanish in about 30 seconds...

Now that I've got that shameless plug out of the way...

I really like the way you have executed on this - particularly the way you show each theme's description while you load the demo page in the background. Are you just pulling themes from ThemeForest at the moment? And may I ask how you're seeding your database? Are you grabbing RSS feeds, or have you built scrapers to go out and grab data from the various description pages?

EDIT: PS, can't get your blog link to work for some reason? I'm in Chrome...

> Sorry to hijack, but I literally just launched something very similar:

ThemeBeacon looks really cool. Love the landing page design.

> I really like the way you have executed on this - particularly the way you show each theme's description while you load the demo page in the background. Are you just pulling themes from ThemeForest at the moment? And may I ask how you're seeding your database? Are you grabbing RSS feeds, or have you built scrapers to go out and grab data from the various description pages?

I've written scrappers that run as background processes every night to fetch data from all the marketplaces (Themeforest, WrapBootstrap and Creative Market).

Visited with an iPad. Everything got tiny, and then Chrome crashed.

Thanks for the heads up. I'll fix the bug shortly.

The sidebar takes up too much space on a mobile view - it would be worthwhile to rethink how to display the information for mobile browsers.

I want to kick you in the fucking nuts for autoloading the demo and not giving me the option to read about it first. You have text there but then you cover it up. Have a separate "Launch Demo" button, seriously.

Nice site. Will use.

One tip... am on Firefox 20 using Linux.

I arrowed through a few themes, but after checking a demo am having trouble backing out into the main menu. It keeps sending me back into the same demo when I "back button" out.

http://bootstrapcarnival.com/search?q= shows empty :)

is there a way to search for free themes?

looks awesome!

> http://bootstrapcarnival.com/search?q= shows empty :)

Ah. Thanks for pointing it out. Will fix it.

> is there a way to search for free themes?

I've added a few free templates and I'll be adding more soon. The only problem is that free templates are all over the place. I need to manually sort through them to find the right demo/download links and to avoid duplication. I'll add a specific tab for free themes once there are around 10 free themes.

That could suck up a lot of your time. Are you planning to semi-automate the process by letting people submit themes ?

Thanks for the suggestion but I think I'll have to come up with nice a way to tackle spam/duplicate entries before I let people submit themes. I am adding it to my TODO list.

Good stuff! I had something similar in mind, but you already made it. Thanks!

Nice!

this is an advert, wtf!

It's advertisement for the maker, just like news about the new thing that Apple/Google/Microsoft/... made. But that’s usually ok.

Many "Show HN"s are, and that's okay. It's a thing the OP made, which is relevant to HN, which happens to have commercial applicability. It's not like spamming affiliate links.

No offence since this is not directly related to bootstrap, but the default example theme is a good example of a style that seems to be gaining popularity and is completely garbage.

Websites (generally) are meant to be read and optimized for digesting data in a meaningful way, they are not an exercise in animation and moving everything into a confusing mess of eyeball soup.

Web designers, would you build a doorway on a house that constantly moves...?

Please stop building web sites where everything animates into place, it's a horrible trend.

You realize a website is fundamentally different than the front door of a house?

That's a silly thing to say, really.

I will elaborate on my point in case you missed it, form should follow function, this principle applies to architecture just as much as a website.

The case with the current trend of animating everything into place reminds me of "Ornament and Crime" which is another architectural idea that can be equally applied to a website.

To be blunt, it simply means stop animating/decorating shit into place for effect, it is meaningless and a disservice to real design.

The analogy is silly. Of course you wouldn't design a door that "constantly moves" but you might design a door that slowly revealed itself as you moved through an architectural experience. And besides, a website is not a door.

Certainly, there is good animation and bad animation. Animation for animation's sake in web design is bad. Animation that helps a user manage attention, removes unnecessary affordance until it's needed, delights its user, underscores contextual importance, and/or communicates system action can be good.

It's funny that you bring up Loos, because I think he might agree with me here:

>My architecture is not conceived by drawings, but by spaces. I do not draw plans, facades or sections… For me, the ground floor, first floor do not exist… There are only interconnected continual spaces, rooms, halls, terraces… Each space needs a different height… These spaces are connected so that ascent and descent are not only unnoticeable, but at the same time functional

Says Loos himself.

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