This tutorial explains the key steps for using Bootstrap and WordPress together, integrating the latest release of the Bootstrap library with a WordPress theme.
Both Bootstrap and WordPress are highly popular: 3.7 websites on the internet are built with Bootstrap and 29% of the web uses WordPress. Clearly, knowing how to build websites and apps using these two robust and mature, open-source technologies can be a valuable skill for developers in the workplace.
There’s quite a lot to cover, so let’s dive in!
Why WordPress?
WordPress is open-source software you can use to create a beautiful website, blog or app.
The popularity of WordPress is mostly due to its ease of use and powerful options for appearance, customization, and extensibility (via themes and plugins).
Thanks to WordPress themes, webmasters with little to no coding experience can power their websites with a professional appearance and custom functionality. Users can easily select different themes with a few clicks using the Appearance menu in the administration dashboard or copy theme files directly into the wp-content > themes folder. Themes can be purchased from dedicated marketplaces, individual developers, or can also be freely installed from the WordPress.org themes directory.
As developers, we can create our own theme, which is what we’re going to do in this tutorial. More specifically, we’re going to perform the key steps towards building a simple WordPress theme that integrates the latest release of the Bootstrap library.
Why Bootstrap?
Bootstrap is a robust and comprehensive UI library for developing responsive and mobile-first websites and apps. Here are some advantages of using Bootstrap as the styling framework for a WordPress theme.
Advantages of Using Bootstrap and WordPress Themes Together
In my view, there are many advantages of using Bootstrap to style a WordPress theme.
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Bootstrap is a popular, open-source project with extensive development and continuous maintenance, which over time has resulted in fewer bugs.
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It’s a cross-browser framework that supports major browsers with a good CSS baseline called [Reboot]
(https://ift.tt/2A7XHC3). -
It has an extensive and thorough documentation.
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It deals with reset, grids, typography, utilities, and media queries, thereby freeing up development time.
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It’s widely used by developers to style websites, so it’s easy to find tutorials, demos, and open-source projects to learn from or extend.
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Bootstrap can be used to quickly create a mobile-first and mobile-optimized WordPress theme without reinventing the wheel.
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There are tons of starter themes made available by the community, such as Understrap, which aim to provide a quick starting point for developers to create WordPress themes with Bootstrap.
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Although it’s not created with WordPress in mind, Bootstrap can be easily integrated with WordPress.
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We can easily customize Bootstrap to meet specific project requirements, once we have enough knowledge of the available classes.
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We can take advantage of hundreds of JavaScript/jQuery plugins already integrated with Bootstrap.
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Starting with Bootstrap 4, plugins use modern ES6.
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With the release of Bootstrap 4, the library now uses Sass instead of Less as the preprocessor of choice, which makes it more widely compatible with a huge number of developer workflows.
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Bootstrap 4 introduces new components such as the card component. Bootstrap cards make it easy to create a modern, card-based layout such as the Masonry-style interface.
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The Bootstrap 4 grid system is built on top of flexbox, which makes the grid even more flexible, developer-friendly and clean.
Are There Any Disadvantages of Using Bootstrap and WordPress Together?
As for the disadvantages, the developer community has raised a few concerns, including the following.
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Bootstrap isn’t designed for straightforward integration with WordPress, but that shouldn’t be a huge obstacle for most developers.
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If we need to override a lot of predefined Bootstrap styles to meet the design requirements, it might not be worthwhile to use a CSS framework at all.
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It’s true that Bootstrap makes it easy to quickly add responsive styling to our theme. However, we also need to invest time learning about Bootstrap to be able to add our customizations so that our themes look different from the numerous Bootstrap-based websites on the Internet.
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Bootstrap depends on jQuery, so in some situations we might have to deal with problems related to jQuery — such as outdated plugins, or having to include the whole jQuery library, even if our project only needs a small feature like
$.ajax().
Prerequisites for Following Along
In this tutorial, I assume you have a development environment with PHP, MySQL and WordPress installed — such as Homestead Improved. This quick tip will help you get up and running with a brand new Homestead Improved Vagrant VM in no time.
You also need to be familiar with WordPress — particularly how to install and activate themes, add WordPress Menus, create posts and pages, etc.
Finally, you need to have some knowledge of how to build a WordPress theme. In fact, this is a tutorial on integrating Bootstrap in a WordPress theme, not a tutorial on how to build a fully functional WordPress theme, which would have a much wider scope than what we have available in this article.
Key Steps to Integrate Bootstrap and WordPress
In this section, we’re going to learn about the key steps we need to perform to integrate Bootstrap in a simple WordPress theme project.
First, let’s review which files we’re going to create.
The Structure of a WordPress Theme
A WordPress theme has a predetermined file structure. Some files are required for the theme to be recognized by WordPress.
The first required file is style.css. This CSS file contains styles for the theme. Most importantly, this file also has a special task: it provides meta information about the theme such as the theme name, description, author, and other extra details. The meta information needs to be present in the head of the file in the form of CSS comments.
The other required file is index.php, which is the main WordPress theme file, and the last fallback template file WordPress relies on, in case it can’t find any other template file to display its content.
There are many optional files, but for our simple Bootstrap-based theme we’re only going to add the following files:
header.phpandfooter.php, to lay out the header and footer sections of our WordPress theme respectively, which are displayed on every page of our themefunctions.php, where we’re going to write the code for loading our theme’s custom stylesheet, Bootstrap styles and scripts, and more.
If you’re curious, check out the other templates that you can customize from the WordPress docs.
Let’s get down to business!
Continue reading %Bootstrap and WordPress Theme Integration in 8 Easy Steps%
by Ahmed Bouchefra via SitePoint
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