Most "regular" websites I've seen generally use Twitter Bootstrap, at least for the grid layout.
Most themes I've seen to WordPress does not use Bootstrap, they are often built with a custom grid layout.
Is Wordpress + bootstrap a bad solution? Or why do so few Wordpress themes use bootstrap?
I'd agree with most of the comments, but I'd argue that this is NOT an opinion based question. There's nothing empirically WRONG or BAD about using Bootstrap in WordPress themes. In fact, I do it every single work day. Sage theme is a popular starter theme that uses Bootstrap, and there's plenty others that do as well.
The technologies are perfectly compatible, it's ultimately just up to your design / development goals for the theme. If you desire finer control and don't want to do a bunch of style overrides for a very specific look-and-feel, then maybe Bootstrap isn't right for that particular project. However, there's nothing from the WordPress side of things that would make this a bad solution.
Related
I have to develop a plugin for Wordpress. Most of the styles are based on the Bootstrap CSS library. However, for some design decisions I have to redefine the default behaviour of bootstrap. What is the recommended way how Bootstrap features are to be redefined?
One example: I need a zebra striped table. The bootstrap class table-striped has already much of the features I need. However the stripes should be green not gray and the contrast should be a bit stronger. In addition some of the features of the Bootstrap class table must e changed – for example padding and font-size.
The clients who are installing my plugin may or may not update to new versions of Wordpress and Bootstrap. Some of the might be unable to change the Wordpress or Bootstrap installation which exists already on their web host. For this reason it is probably not a solution to modify Wordpress files or the Bootstrap original CSS. In addition: The solution must work with various browsers – not just browsers of the last generation.
I have looked in various forums and found a number of suggestions – including .less and recompiling a modified version of Bootstrap. However, many of these solutions look more like hacks or “work-arounds” rather than a “recommended software architecture” - a kind industrial standard. Other solutions work only with very new browsers.
To summarize my question: How should we integrate modifications like these outlined above into a Wordpress / Bootstrap environment?
If you're worried about Bootstrap updates you could always do some kind of "child theme" type of treatment: You can be using your main style.css to overwrite the bootstrap styles. Then your WordPress theme and Bootstrap styles can be independent.
I started to look into DotNetNuke recently as a client asked me to do so.
I noticed straight away that DNN is different from other CMS I'm familiar with in a way that it mixes its own controls with site's presentation. (Other cms like Umbraco, Wordpress, Orchard have separate interfaces for content management).
I'm building a responsive website and using Zurb foundation for it. The problem I have is that DNN's css start to mess Zurb's css. I don't want to edit neither css and the problem seems very serious. Is it addressed somehow in DNN?
Bearing in mind how popular mobile browsing has become responsive desings and hence frameworks like Zurb or Twitter bootstrap will gain more and more popularity. And it looks like DNN doesn't play nicely with them, it may become a huge no no for DNN.
The whole idea of mixing site's presentation with cms controls looks wrong to me. Is it possible to prevent them from mixing and messing with each other?
Cheers.
There is a Portal.css file that always gets loaded no matter what DNN skin you use. Then each DNN skin loads a skin.css file associated with the skin/theme and any other specific CSS files it needs to reference.
The issue you are probably having is that the default styles set in Portal.css are conflicting with your theme. What you may need to do is override the CSS that is causing trouble at the top of your skin file.
But yes, this does happen since DNN declares styles for modal popups, dropdowns, links etc that are used in the admin functionality and since that is inline with the actual site design they can conflict if you are using a framework like bootstrap, etc.
We created a Foundation DNN Skin specifically to solve what you're looking for - https://github.com/Ethanhackett/foundation-5-dnn-skin
It avoids the CSS conflicts and has some jQuery no conflict resolutions which need to be addressed since DNN is on jQuery v1... and Foundation is using jQuery 2...
I hope that helps.
I hope this is not too basic to be off-topic, but I am wondering to what extent it is possible to customize WordPress to fit an existing design. I have a design in mind and read somewhere (WordPress manuals?) that it is possible to only manage a small part of a website with WordPress and then slowly migrate the whole site to be WordPress-managed. If one would like to preserve a certain design, is this preferred to tweaking WordPress templates? That is to say, should I start from a website and slowly move into WordPress, or should I start from the WordPress template, and try to tweak it until I arrive at the design I want. Are there any examples of WordPress sites, which fall into light-weight (but image heavy) websites, which exhibit freedom from the WordPress mold? (Is this too vague?)
Generally speaking, I think it makes more sense to start with WordPress from the start if that is what you intend to use at the end. It will be much easier to transition your site into being fully WordPress-managed after you have some small piece of it in WordPress. This is because, while a lot of the design will fit easily into the HTML WordPress with only minor tweaks, WordPress theming is kind of a specific subcategory of its own, and there will be less of a barrier to moving if your start with CSS that is compatible with WordPress.
WordPress also makes it easy to override individual page nodes, so the static portions of your site can be part of WordPress in a very loose sense, and you'll have full control over the markup. It is less to start writing your markup knowing what you've already had to do to get your design to work with WordPress than to transition to WordPress later.
If you are new to WordPress theming, here are some links to get you started:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development
http://themeshaper.com/2009/06/22/wordpress-themes-templates-tutorial/
Your approach depends on the technical capabilities of you to setup two sites that live next to each other.
In general, you'll have to modify Wordpretss theme to fit your design. I prefer something of a skeleton theme - http://themehybrid.com/themes Skeleton/Hybrid one. The thing about this approach is that you'll have to build your design from ground up and fit it into Wordpress way of doing things. Wordpress likes to output HTML with additional CSS styles and it's usually much easier to use those elements then to modify them to fit yours.
My personal choice, I'd start using WordPress right away, learn as much as I can about the CMS aspects, you have great tutorials at WP101 (dot) com then move to create or built your own templates. I'd suggest you first start with a simple template like Twenty Ten and modify it then perhaps you can use Responsive which is my favorite or many others. This 2 sites for example were built in WP
http://www.philiphousenyc.com/ and
http://www.danielhopwood.com/
Good Luck,
Mike
Thing I plan to do is to make many websites based on Drupal core.
All of these websites will be quite small, but there will be many of them (in matter of hundreds).
I'm working on this with one HTML / CSS coder, guy who should make themes for every website we make.
He doesn't know much of a PHP (enough for PHPTemplateEngine tho) therefor I what I want is to make as little interaction between me and him as possible. He shouldn't touch PHP part of themes, I shouldn't touch HTML part of themes.
My question is:
Can you tell me what structure of theme folder should I use, what's your opinion of Zen theme for beginning of Drupal theming and how can I make automatic JavaScript and CSS loading script for themes?
Also I'd greatly appreciate any tips concerning multi-site Drupal setup, best practices and so on.
Thanks in advance.
With regards to drupal theming you have a couple of options:
If all the themes will share 98% of the same code base and just have different classes etc to style it visually different (say a different heading colour), then you can get away with one drupal theme and use theme settings to alter the configuration of the theme on each site. This has the advantage of having to maintain only one code base. Zen can still be used as a base theme if you wish
Another option is one you have mentioned above, in which you have a base theme which declares all inherited code, and sub themes to which override specific parts of the base theme to create the necessary effects. I would suggest that this is the better option if your themes vary wildly from one site to another. There is a administrative burden with this option though, as say you have 100 sites, you could potentially have 100 sub-themes to maintain and provide fixes for.
I got the design (PSD) from client. Which should i choose to make custom Wordpress themes.
I should use any Wordpress theme
Framework?
or Any WordpressBlank theme?
or I should find similar free theme
to my design then edit to it
I can't say for sure without knowing your PSD. It depends.
If the layout from your PSD is too specific, I would go for a blank theme.
If it's a well known 3 column pattern for example that you don't need to create any customization whatsover, I would use a Wordpress Theme Framework.
I would never try to find a free theme and edit it, mainly because:
you need to read it's licenses and usually attribute properly with a link in your project (bad option when you're doing something for a client);
usually it's more work to adapt a theme instead of creating from scratch. I would adapt a theme only if 80% of it would be already equal to my PSD requirements.
I agree with the other comment. I've used all 3 methods: framework, pre-made, and blank themes, and I've found that using a blank theme is the easiest when starting from a PSD file. I've used Chris Coyier's blank theme (http://digwp.com/2010/02/blank-wordpress-theme/), which is a bare bones theme with the basic functionality of a WordPress theme, but no CSS styling, making it easier to add your own markup. I wrote a blog post about this, comparing the differences among blank themes, frameworks, and pre-made themes (http://www.sinawiwebdesign.com/blog/topics/wordpress/use-wordpress-framework-or-blank-theme/).
When I build themes starting from a PSD file, I first write the HTML, CSS, and Javascript code to get a working prototype, and then I convert it to WordPress using a blank theme. I copy and paste most of my code directly into the blank theme with little modification, then add some code for custom menus, widget areas, support for post thumbnails, etc.