Reassessing Bootstrap For Dolphin Pro
We had a brief talk about Bootstrap today, again. Every now and then the lure of pre-cooked CSS elements takes our attention, and yet we keep resisting. I've mentioned Bootstrap before and that it doesn't work for us because of UI inconsistencies, but I thought maybe we could use the lego-pieces without necessarily doing an "all-bootstrap" cookie-cutter site. And so we looked again, and talked again.
Only to find that there're still plenty of reasons why we should stick to our own classes, own designs, fix out own bugs and update in our own time...
First, Bootstrap-ed sites are becoming ubiquitous and people are picking up the "look-alike" feel. As this picture from Zingdesign demonstrates uniqueness of design is often pushed away in favour of quick delivery. It's often hard enough to persuade Dolphin webmaster to use custom templates, and if we add BS to the mix - we'd end up with an army of clones.
Second, in our own subjective testing Bootstrap-based templates still seem to be rather heavy. There is no snappy feel of seamless interaction, especially when it comes to older devices like iPhone 5, iPad 2, etc. So, effectively utilising all those fancy BS-packages is out of question, while bare Bootstrap doesn't offer nearly enough to justify dependency on yet another 3rd-party technology.
And third, even at v3, and even with Twitter backing Bootstrap is still buggy. Icons often show weird ghost lines, navigation menus do not scale down graciously at very small screens (iPhone portrait) and have ugly overlaps, select boxes still can't override browser design, etc, etc. We may as well just spend time debugging our own code, instead of waiting for BS guys to fix things.
Thus, Dolphin Pro responsive design shall be a home-brew, specifically geared towards the needs of Dolphin, Boonex Market and our clients. Later this week or early next week we should have a clearer roadmap for upcoming Dolphin Pro releases, so stay tuned!
You're very welcome to share your Bootstrap-related thoughts. This post would be a great reference post for anyone asking about Bootstrapped Dolphin.
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Like any new technology that comes out, it's never the way we want it to be but it's the potential that it has for down the road.
Buggy, for sure, i've seen lines or little squares using the glyph-icons.
It's very intimidating when you first look at it because of all the CSS so to make the most out of it, the designer would need to know how Bootstrap works or frustration will take over.
I don't think it would be a bad idea keeping up with where they're see more
Well especially now because all the elements have been created and referenced in the structure it is.
I guess another way of looking at it is if there's only a few things that Bootstrap has that would be nice to include into Dolphin, it would be pointless implementing it.
You would have to be 100% dedicated to making it pretty well all Bootstrapped.
There's always a culprit to work out so why should there be a need to work out more than there really needs to be?
Debugging and see more
Mmm, now what could BS stand for? LOL ^_^
Thanks Boonex for realising that jumping on yet another bandwagon; no matter who supports it, is a bad idea.
For a professional product as I like to think that is dolphin, I think it is necessary.
I honestly would abandon the platform, and I migrate to something else, I think drupal, if you will not provide support for botstrap in future.
Today over 50% of users use mobile phones, tablets, or other gaget.
I think it is essential to be able to project a design for each one, without the need of using an app especially for unregistered see more
To be honest I do not care how it is done but it should be done long time ago. It is good to go with mainstream or we will be forgotten.
I can monitor our users and they mostly complain about the site look and feel. Not to mention that it is almost unusable on mobile devices.
With the proper template infrastructure, Dolphin templates can be designed to adapt to whatever you throw at them, and using some external css platform will do nothing to facilitate development of unique looks for Dolphin sites... in fact, that would most likely colossally see more