I agree in principle with this reply. Very few shops use the OFBiz
eCommerce front-end - it wasn't intended to be used as-is, instead its
there for demonstration purposes.
Each business will have a preference for styling their site, so choosing
one theme over all others seems presumptuous.
As I mentioned in the Jira issue, HTML cleanups are always welcome.
Consistent and concise markup makes it easier to design themes - and
from my perspective that provides the most benefit to OFBiz developers.
-Adrian
On 5/7/2013 2:49 PM, Richard Siddall wrote:
Jonatan Soto wrote:
Would be anyone interested in convert the existing frontend themes into
Bootstrap http://twitter.github.io/bootstrap/?
The idea is to create a theme from scratch that will replace the current
default and multiplex themes.
[snip]
While I think having more modern front-end themes would be great, let
me play devil's advocate...
Why Bootstrap?
Why not Zurb Foundation (http://foundation.zurb.com/), HTML5
Boilerplate (http://html5boilerplate.com/) or some other starting
point? Or as Scott Kellum argued on the Compass list (on January 8),
use a combination of components such as Susy, Sassy-buttons,
Color-Schemer, and Modular-Scale.
Bootstrap is an easy way of getting a lot of functionality, but it's
arguable overused. It's fast becoming to HTML5 frameworks what Times
Roman is to web fonts. If you want your web shop to look like
everyone else's web shop, it's a great choice. If you want to
differentiate yourself in the market, use something else.
Plus, many Bootstrap-based themes just throw the whole bloated
framework at the browser, regardless of which pieces they use, slowing
page loads and wasting mobile bandwidth allocations. But Bootstrap is
built on LESS, so you can choose which chunks of CSS and JavaScript
should be included in your site's copy of Bootstrap, as well as using
variables and mixins to get more consistent CSS styling.
LESS is based on JavaScript, which practically requires you to install
Node.js to use it. Zurb Foundation is based on SASS, which is written
in Ruby. It looks like SASS will run on JRuby on the JVM.
To summarize:
- Bootstrap is just one of several great HTML5 frameworks
- You can get the same effects using straight CSS3 and JavaScript, or
smaller projects for areas like responsive design, button styling,
text spacing, etc.
- Bootstrap is overused
- Bootstrap is frequently ineptly used, penalizing the end user
- A major reason to use Bootstrap is to use LESS and other languages
that abstract CSS and JavaScript
- Bootstrap may not be the best framework for a Java-based project
I hope this helps.
Regards,
Richard Siddall
