Bootstrap & Web Site Structure

What is Bootstrap?

“Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework for developing responsive, mobile-first web sites.” – From W3Schools Bootstrap Tutorial

Why Use It?

• Responsive Web Design: lots of built-in (“out of the box”) features to ensure that your site looks good across all types/sizes of devices
• NavBar: Beautiful menus!
• Consistent look and feel: buttons, menus, headings, lists, and many other Web page components
• Themes: Many lovely themes available to change the colors and other aspects of appearance just by swapping out a file! See Bootswatch for a nice selection of free downloadable themes
• Grow your Developer Skillset: the skillset we want to build here isn’t Bootstrap per se, but rather the ability to incorporate a third-party framework into a project, and an understanding of how the pieces fit together within the project structure. While Bootstrap isn’t a required tool for all development projects, it is a common and very useful one. There are many, many, many JavaScript and CSS libraries out there and even before you start writing your own JavaScript code you can and should understand how to install and use these tools.

How Do I Get Bootstrap Into My Project?

• Prepare your directory structure: Bootstrap includes files for scripts (JavaScript), fonts, and CSS and we need to organize these files within our site. We will follow the common convention of creating separate directories for CSS, Scripts, Images, and Fonts.
  • Open your Web project in Atom: make sure you are in your site’s main Project Folder (FilmFestivalSite in below example).
  • Add project folders: right-click on your project folder in Atom and choose “New Folder” to create folders named css, fonts, images, and scripts.

• Get Bootstrap
  • Download: Go to http://getbootstrap.com/getting-started/#download. Click the Download Bootstrap button. That will download a file named bootstrap-3.3.6-dist.zip to your computer.
  • Unzip the files: On Windows machines you will find the zip in your Downloads directory, right-click and choose “Extract All”. You can change the destination folder if you like before hitting the “Extract” button, but be sure you know where the files are.
  • Copy the files to the folders in your Web project: the extracted files are organized into css, fonts, and js folders below the bootstrap-3.3.6-dist folder. Copy to the matching folders in your Web project: css to css, fonts to fonts, and “js” to “scripts”. Hint: In Atom you can right-click on a folder and select “Show in Explorer” (Windows) or “Show in Finder” (Mac) to open your destination folder to set up the copy with side-by-side windows.
• Get JQuery:
  • Note: Version as of this writing is 1.12.3; get the latest 1.x.x version
  • Download JQuery: https://jquery.com/download/. Under the JQuery 1.x section right-click on “Download the uncompressed development jQuery 1.12.3” and choose “save link as”.  Save the file as  jquery-1.12.3.js
  • Copy the JQuery file to your project: copy jquery-1.12.3.js to the “scripts” folder of your project
  • Note on Uncompressed vs. Min versions of JQuery:  JQuery can be downloaded in its uncompressed form as above or in a “minimized” form jquery-1.12.3.min.js. The min version is much more efficient for use on your Web Page. For user-friendly pages it is important to minimize page load time and the size of scripts so in “Production” we would always deploy the “min” version of both CSS and JavaScript files. However, for development we want to be able to read, understand, and learn from the CSS and script files so we use the uncompressed (non-“min”) versions in our development environment.

Our First Bootstrap Page:

• Add a new HTML file named “BootstrapSample.html” to your Web site’s main folder.
• Copy content from our “Bootstrap Sample Page” to experience the power of Bootstrap right away. Once everyone has it running in your environment we can explain some of the opportunities for you to customize it and make it your own. This one is put together from combining elements of sample templates on the Bootstrap site
• The one change you will need to make is highlighted: that is the anchor <a> tag for one of the menu links; in my example it links to a page named “FilmDetails.html”. Change it to link to your own page.

Deployment Considerations:

Once you have your page working in your own environment if you want to upload it to your Web site on the server you need to ensure that the folder structure and files needed for Bootstrap and JQuery are uploaded as well. In ATOM you can select your css folder for upload to copy the folder and its contents; do the same with your scripts, fonts, and images folders.