Since its debut in August 2011, Twitter Bootstrap, now simply Bootstrap, has become by far the most popular framework for empowering and enhancing frontend web design. With Version 3, Bootstrap reaches an exciting new milestone, introducing a mobile-first responsive grid, new and powerful LESS mixins, and a lean code base optimized for modern browsers.
This book is a hands-on guide to the inner workings of Bootstrap. In an easy-to-follow, step-by-step format, you'll experience the power of customizing and recompiling Bootstrap's LESS files and adapting Bootstrap's JavaScript plugins to design professional user interfaces.
At the end of the day, this book is about something bigger than Bootstrap. Bootstrap is but a tool—a means to an end. By the end of this book, you will become a more adept and efficient web designer.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Bootstrap, teaches us how to download Bootstrap, set up a site template based on the HTML5 Boilerplate, and practice compiling Bootstrap's LESS files to CSS.
Chapter 2, Bootstrappin' Your Portfolio, helps us to build a basic portfolio site with a full-width carousel, three columns of text, and social icons provided by Font Awesome—customizing Bootstrap's LESS files and adding your own in the process.
Chapter 3, Bootstrappin' a WordPress Theme, enables us to take the portfolio design from Chapter 2, Bootstrappin' Your Portfolio, and turn it into a WordPress theme. We'll start with the excellent Roots Theme and customize template files, LESS, CSS, and JavaScript to suit our needs.
Chapter 4, Bootstrappin' Business, shows us how to create a complex banner area, add dropdown menus and utility navigation, build a complex three-column page layout, and add a four-column footer, and ensures that all these things remain fully responsive!
Chapter 5, Bootstrappin' E-commerce, guides us through the design of a products page capable of managing multiple rows of products in a complex responsive grid. While at it, we will provide a fully responsive design for options to filter products by category, brand, and so on.
Chapter 6, Bootstrappin' a One-page Marketing Website, gives a detailed outline of how to design a beautiful one-page scrolling website with a large welcome message, a grid of product features with large icons, customer testimony in a masonry layout, and a set of three thoughtfully designed pricing tables.
Appendix A, Optimizing Site Assets, walks us through the essential process for optimizing Bootstrap LESS/CSS and JavaScript for production, using the portfolio results from Chapter 2, Bootstrappin' Your Portfolio as an example. This will help you in all Bootstrap projects.
Appendix B, Implementing Responsive Images, includes the process of implementing the leading responsive images solution, Picturefill, in the home page carousel for the portfolio site in Chapter 2, Bootstrappin' Your Portfolio, which you can use in all your future projects.
Appendix C, Adding Swipe to the Carousel, describes the process of implementing a leading plugin for adding swipe functionality, Hammer.js, to the Bootstrap carousel.
To complete the exercises in this book, you will need the following software:
A modern web browser (Internet Explorer 8 or newer)
A code editor
A LESS compiler with
less.jsupdated to at least Version 1.3.3
This book is assumed to be good for readers who are comfortable with hand-coding HTML and CSS and are familiar with the fundamentals of valid HTML5 markup and well-structured stylesheets. Basic familiarity with JavaScript is a bonus, as we will be making use of Bootstrap's jQuery plugins. We will work a great deal with LESS to customize, compose, and compile stylesheets. Those who are familiar with LESS will gain significant experience working with the details of Bootstrap's LESS files. Those who are new to LESS will find this book a reasonably thorough primer.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "less/bootstrap/navbar.less".
A block of code is set as follows:
<FilesMatch "\.(ttf|otf|eot|woff)$">
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"
</IfModule>
</FilesMatch>New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Once there, the large Download source button is your friend."
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