Twitter Bootstrap Generator (opens in new tab)

After playing around with Bootstrap, I realized what a huge boon it was to my projects (programmer lacking in design skills). One thing I like about it is I don't have to pick colors. It does the border, button, text, and nav-bar colors for me. I don't trust myself to pick my own colors! I would really like a way to preview or be able to pick some other colors other people have made. Maybe you could expose a perma-link to a set of config options so they are easy to share.

I'm also amazed at how often I spot it now. Seems like it's everywhere.

I am really not trying to stir a pot here. I am truly looking to learn. But the whole idea of bootstrap seems to go against other stuff I used to read about how to use css. I understood that your markup should be semantic and detached from you layout and style as much as possible. But when you use the bootstrap grid to arrange your page, you are absolutely mixing content and layout.

For me, I always thought actually fully separating markup and layout/styling was a pipe dream, and unless you're going to absolutely fill your page with id's and classes (a la zen garden) and spend enormous time tweaking things, then a major overhaul will require changing markup anyway, so why bother? But that seemed to fly in the face of advice I was reading. But using a grid seems to fly in the face of that old advice too. So what's the deal? Do people no longer think markup and styling/layout should be separated? Or was I just misinterpreting what I read in the past?

This is great. You should add a color picker to the text field boxes.

Very nice, being able to see the CSS applied to some generic HTML before downloading would be cool too! Thanks for the nice work.

I don't get it. What does this tool accomplish that isn't accomplished by putting the collected color definitions in a second style sheet and "cascading" it with the standard bootstrap.css? (I'm really asking not being sarcastic.)

This is pretty cool.

That said, a Bootstrap generator that generates LESS, which in turn generates CSS? Seems overengineered. Almost all of these variables are in variables.less anyway. I'd hope that anyone setting up Bootstrap has the skills to edit this one file.

https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/blob/master/lib/variabl...

This is awesome! But I want to be able to save my preferences on it, either by permalinking them (useful-ish) OR in localStorage (better) or both (whoa yeah party)

So it could have a 'save to localStorage' button, then a list of your previous saved configurations in a side panel?

Excellent work!

There's an entire ecosystem coalescing around Bootstrap and I love it. It's the framework for the coders who are design challenged. I know more and more people like me who are incorporating it in every project they build. In time it will raise the minimum level design bar for the entire web.

This is nice, but why not just use the variables in variables.less? That's what they are there for.

What? No top bar customization? That is the biggest giveaway for Bootstrap and the easiest way to differentiate your site.

Once you add that then you'll have something super useful. I've customized the top bar color for a few different sites and it is a bit painful. (there was an open bug about making it easier, haven't checked it lately though)

just to clarify, I didn't create the generator. I saw it on the bootstrap google group:

http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-bootstrap/browse_thre...

The author wrote it in one evening which makes it even more impressive.

Great. If you can add customization of top bar, it would be awesome. Thanks for creating this tool.

"No ending semi-colon is required." seems like a detail that could be handled behind the scenes.

If you can afford to be working with a bit of a moving target, don't waste your time with the current version of BS. The 2.0-wip branch is vastly more improved.

Excellent stuff! You may want to keep an eye out as Bootstrap 2 is probably going to come out any day now if the Issues tracker on Github is any indicator.

Great work Martin! Such a simple tool that makes Bootstrap more available to everyone - not just those of blessed with Less skills ;)

If you do build anything using Bootstrap, please feel free to submit to Built With Bootstrap:

http://builtwithbootstrap.com/submit

I would like a pre-set color palette option

Using Rails and Twitter Bootstrap? Check out this extraction I put together from a personal project that makes it super easy to generate Bootstrap-style forms: https://github.com/potenza/form-bootstrap

A huge benefit to this tool would be instant change feedback. Specifically, given that this site uses bootstrap, it would be nice to see the changes you put in to the various input fields change the css settings for the editor itself.

SASS & LESS formats maybe?

Source Code would be nice. I wish to hack it a bit.

a nice addition would be a disable button. For example, I never use the grids. Otherwise, great work!

Awesome job!

I've found Bootstrap to be best employed as a basic framework for what I would call working applications where the user is required to perform many repetitive tasks on the application throughout their work day. It lends itself very well for dashboards, admin consoles, backoffice and reporting tools, etc. And Twitter, of course. I would use the most very basic scaffolding (containers, rows and spans) for a marketing site, but it's also extremely helpful for producing working wireframes.

To whit, over the past two weeks I completely redid a support application using Bootstrap and my output CSS totals ~250 lines, whereas before it was somewhere around ~2600 when it was all said and done. My current .js file has two functions in it. I think we've found a winner here.

Another benefit is that a developer not well-versed in the front-end is easily able to build a basic, functioning front-end to an app with small learning curve, and I'm going to assume that they'll be able to work on an app that already has it. Or so I hope, because after twelve years, I'm a little sick and tired of writing said code.