Accelerating Application Development Using Bootstrap

Bootstrap is one of the most popular and widely used front-end frameworks based on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s a household name among web developers who have built at least a handful of websites. This fame is well-earned, as Bootstrap comes packed with ready-to-use components and resources that can drastically cut down your application development time.

Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Application Development with Bootstrap

Every skilled developer knows the value of time, especially in development. Efficiency translates to faster deployment, and quicker deployments mean delivering a better product to end users more frequently. That’s why investing a few hours, or even days, in planning the development process and strategy can save you significant amounts of time in the long run.

I’ve personally been a Bootstrap user for the past 4 years, incorporating it into approximately 90% of my projects. In this article, I’m excited to share some insights on how to maximize your development speed with Bootstrap without sacrificing its powerful features.

Mastering Bootstrap

While Bootstrap is known for its user-friendliness, don’t mistake its initial simplicity for a lack of depth. Before diving headfirst into your project, take some time to familiarize yourself with the framework. Explore its key elements and play around with its diverse components. This will help you sidestep The 10 Most Common Bootstrap Mistakes.

A good starting point is dedicating an hour to reading through the documentation on Bootstrap’s website. You can also delve into informative articles like “What is Bootstrap? A Short Tutorial on the What, Why, and How” on Toptal’s blog, and another excellent resource Bootstrap 3 Tips and Tricks You Might Not Know on scotch.io.

If pouring over documentation isn’t your style and you’d rather learn by example, then Bootstrap’s website is the place to be. Fire up your web inspector, explore the site’s source code, and examine each code block and its elements. This hands-on approach is arguably one of the fastest and most effective ways to get a grasp of the fundamentals.

Pay close attention to the page structure to understand how layouts are constructed.

1
2
3
4
5
<div class="container">
    <div class="row">
    ...
    </div>
</div>

… experiment by resizing your browser window or using Chrome’s Viewport Resizer to learn about how media query utilities work.

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
/* Extra small devices (phones, less than 768px) */
/* No media query since this is the default in Bootstrap */

/* Small devices (tablets, 768px and up) */
@media (min-width:
@screen-sm-min) { ... }

/* Medium devices (desktops, 992px and up) */
@media (min-width:
@screen-md-min) { ... }

/* Large devices (large desktops, 1200px and up) */
@media (min-width:
@screen-lg-min) { ... }

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
@media (max-width: @screen-xs-max) { ... }
@media (min-width:
@screen-sm-min) and (max-width: @screen-sm-max) { ...
}
@media (min-width:
@screen-md-min) and (max-width: @screen-md-max) { ...
}
@media (min-width:
@screen-lg-min) { ... }

… and understand when and how to use them effectively. Familiarize yourself with column classes to achieve optimal responsive design results.

1
2
3
4
<div class="row">
    <div class="col-sm-7 col-md-9 col-xs-6">Left column</div>
    <div class="col-sm-5 col-md-3 col-xs-6">Right column</div> 
</div>

W3Schools offers a comprehensive complete Bootstrap reference encompassing all CSS classes, components, and JavaScript plugins. The best part is that they provide “Try it Yourself” examples for each:

A breakdown of Bootstrap’s grid system: grids in Bootstrap
Essential CSS classes: typography, buttons, forms and form elements, helper classes, images, tables
Individual component overviews: glyphicons, drop-downs, navs.

While exploring the source code, try to familiarize yourself with as many class names as possible. Understand their intended uses – the hows, whens, and whys. This knowledge will streamline your HTML writing and UI element styling. By learning about these pre-built components, you can avoid bloating your stylesheets with redundant code. Keep your codebase lean and efficient by reusing existing components instead of creating new ones from scratch.

Learning more about Bootstrap components will help avoid bloating your stylesheets

This practice of code reuse becomes especially crucial when collaborating on a project with a team of developers. It’s important to establish clear guidelines to prevent ending up with a codebase full of duplicate styles for the same elements. Maintaining consistency in UI development and documenting everything with UI style guides contributes significantly to a more productive team workflow. This approach also reduces frustration when introducing new features or pages to your application. Having worked on numerous large-scale projects, I’ve witnessed firsthand the pitfalls of modifying the framework’s core files directly. It often leads to a messy codebase, making updates and maintenance a nightmare.

7 Common Styling Mistakes That Waste Time

1. Centering Text or Divs

When you need to center a div or its content, use one of these classes:

Use text-center

1
<p class="text-center">I am centered text</p>

… or center-block

1
<div class="center-block">I am centered text</div>

Avoid using .center or

2. Adjusting Font Size

For smaller or larger fonts, utilize these classes:

1
<p class="lead">I'm bigger paragraph text.</p>

1
<p class="small">I'm smaller paragraph text.</p>

For larger or smaller headers, remember .h1, .h2, .h3, .h4, .h5, .h6, and .small. Use them like this:

1
<h1 class="h2">Smaller Title with .h2</h1>

1
<h3 class="h1">Bigger Title with .h1</h3>

1
<h4 class="small">Smaller Title with .small</h4>

3. Clearing Floats or Self-Clearing Children

Instead of creating custom classes like .clear, leverage Bootstrap’s .clearfix class.

1
<div class="clearfix">...</div>

4. Removing .row Class Margins

Opt for .clearfix instead of defining custom styles or, even worse, resorting to inline styles:

1
<div class="clearfix">...</div>

5. Unstyling or Inlining Lists and Other Elements

To remove the default list-style and left margin on list items, directly apply the class to the immediate children. For nested lists, add the class name to them as well.

1
2
3
4
5
6
<ul class="list-unstyled">
  <li>...</li>
</ul>
<ul class="list-inline">
  <li>...</li>
</ul>

Similarly, for checkboxes or radio buttons, use .checkbox-inline and .radio-inline.

For left-aligned and inline-block controls in your forms (or elements styled as forms), use .form-inline.

6. Sizing Buttons

Need different button sizes? Use .btn-lg, .btn-sm, or .btn-xs for variations.

7. Floating and Aligning Elements

Use .pull-right, .pull-left, .text-right, .text-left instead of .right, .left, .left-float, .right-float to position elements. !important helps avoid specificity issues. These classes can also be used as mixins with CSS preprocessors.

1
2
<div class="pull-left">...</div>
<div class="pull-right">...</div>

Align text within components easily with text alignment classes.

1
2
<p class="text-left">Left aligned text.</p>
<p class="text-right">Right aligned text.</p>

Avoid Directly Modifying Bootstrap’s Core Files

When tackling large-scale projects, I’ve learned that the most effective way to work with Bootstrap is to build upon it rather than altering its core files directly. This principle applies to other platforms and libraries you might incorporate into your project.

While directly customizing the framework might seem appealing for smaller websites with minimal design changes, it’s generally not the best approach for larger projects. For instance, you might be tempted to strip down the framework to only the essential components. While you can configure components, variables, and jQuery plugins on Bootstrap’s website to generate a custom version, this method can lead to issues down the road, especially when working with a team or anticipating significant updates.

For larger projects with multiple developers, keeping things separate and well-organized is paramount. Store the framework files in a separate folder outside of your custom CSS directory, and treat it as a non-editable, non-versioned resource. Remove unused CSS by leveraging Grunt or Gulp plugins like grunt-uncss or gulp-uncss. Alternatively, you can serve Bootstrap via a CDN. By maintaining a clean separation, upgrading to the latest version becomes significantly easier. This approach minimizes potential conflicts and styling inconsistencies, enabling a smoother workflow, especially with frequent UI changes.

Make use of scaffolding tools like Yeoman or Slush and package managers such as Bower, Python’s pip, Node’s NPM, or Ruby Gems. They offer more than simply adding files to your project. I’m a big advocate for Bower—it’s far more capable than just a simple file downloader. Using a package manager is a wise move, as project complexity tends to grow, and managing third-party plugins and their dependencies (including those related to Bootstrap) can become unwieldy. Bower helps you keep track of all these dependencies effectively.

Leveraging Bootstrap’s Resources

Bootstrap’s popularity translates to a treasure trove of helpful resources: comprehensive articles, practical tutorials, third-party plugins and extensions, ready-to-use templates, intuitive theme builders, and more. Whether you’re seeking inspiration or searching for specific code snippets, there’s a wealth of information available to accelerate your development.

You might assume that with such an abundance of resources, everyone would be taking full advantage of them. However, surprisingly, that’s not always the case. Some developers miss out on these valuable resources, hindering their project’s progress. While simply copying and pasting code isn’t ideal, you should analyze and adapt relevant solutions to your coding style and technical needs. The ability to identify and effectively utilize valuable resources is a skill in itself, honed through years of experience and accumulated knowledge.

Here’s a curated list of resources to get you started:

Templates, Themes and Plugins

Official Themes from Bootstrap’s creators: themes.getbootstrap.com.

Marketplaces offering premium Bootstrap themes and templates: wrapbootstrap.com, themeforest.net, creativemarket.com/themes/bootstrap.

Free Bootstrap Themes & Templates: startbootstrap.com, www.bootstrapzero.com, shapebootstrap.net/free-templates.

“The Big Badass List” - a comprehensive collection of 319 useful Bootstrap resources: bootstraphero.com/the-big-badass-list-of-twitter-bootstrap-resources/

AngularJS

BootstrapUI built purely with AngularJS by the AngularUI Team.

ReactJS

React-Bootstrap is a library filled with reusable front-end components. You get the familiar look and feel of Twitter Bootstrap combined with cleaner code through Facebook’s React.js framework.

Django

Seamless Bootstrap 3 integration with Django: https://github.com/dyve/django-bootstrap3

Jekyll

Jekyll-Bootstrap provides a complete blog scaffolding solution for Jekyll-powered blogs.

WordPress

WordPress starter theme Sage offers a streamlined, modern approach to front-end development for WordPress, leveraging HTML5 Boilerplate, gulp, Bower, and Bootstrap.

Material Design

Material Design for Bootstrap is a Bootstrap 3 theme that allows you to implement Google’s Material Design principles within your favorite front-end framework.

In Conclusion

Bootstrap stands as one of the most powerful front-end frameworks available, offering a comprehensive toolkit and resources to dramatically speed up your application development process.

It can save you countless hours, even days, of work when designing and building a visually appealing and functional UI. Each component and plugin is meticulously documented, complete with live examples and code samples to simplify implementation and customization. Highly recommended by countless developers, Bootstrap is a popular choice for both rapid prototyping and production-ready applications. It excels at crafting mobile-friendly, responsive websites. Bootstrap provides an excellent foundation for a wide range of projects. Its clear structure makes it designer-friendly, allowing for easy customization without the need for convoluted code workarounds. Most importantly, it encourages a structured workflow, enabling you to focus on building a solid structure first and fine-tuning the visual aspects later. Take the time to truly understand its capabilities and leverage its strengths effectively to achieve your development goals faster and more efficiently.