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WordPress

Posted by Jack Kenyon
Jack Kenyon
3,344 Points

An explanation of Bootstrap?

I'm a newbie at coding, so I'm pretty ignorant about tools. I'm tyring to build sites for Wordpress and I came across the 'From Bootstrap To Wordpress' course. What is bootstrap? Should I be learning how to use it?

2 Answers

Daniel Gibson
Daniel Gibson
15,452 Points
Daniel Gibson
Daniel Gibson
15,452 Points

Bootstrap is a front end framework - a collection of CSS classes and components that are pre-made so that you can rapidly build your website without having to code everything from scratch.

http://getbootstrap.com/ has examples and will explain everything a lot better than I can.

Frank Stepanski
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.a{fill-rule:evenodd;}techdegree
Frank Stepanski
Full Stack JavaScript Techdegree Student 1,565 Points
Frank Stepanski
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Frank Stepanski
Full Stack JavaScript Techdegree Student 1,565 Points

Bootstrap, foundation, gumby, skeleton, semantic grid system, etc are all CSS frameworks that give you a starting point on how you can layout your site quickly.

Some are more robust than others, but basically they all give you a set of CSS files that you include in your web project (WordPress or other web framework or just static HTML and CSS), that help you layout your site with a certain layout in mind. That layout is normally a grid which can more easily make your site responsive compared to doing it from scratch.

The negatives are that some bloat your site in the amount of files a user has to download and can restrict your layout in that it may not conform easily to how you want to design it. There are good and bad points to using a framework, but it is the "buzzword" of 2013/2014 so lots are trying to learn it.

The best advice is ignore them, until you understand the fundamentals of design in HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, etc. Then you can choose one to start and see if you like it.