Using the power of Bootstrap for your Drupal website
This modern, sleek, intuitively understandable mobile-first front-end framework for creating responsive websites and apps has won the hearts of many. Twitter’s creation, Bootstrap, is the choice of many organizations, including Apple, Microsoft and NASA, which speaks volumes about its quality. We are now going to discuss some reasons for the popularity of Bootstrap, as well as how to combine it with our favorite Drupal CMF, so a Drupal site can fully enjoy all of Bootstrap’s front-end superpowers.
Bootstrap’s benefits that make it worth adding to your Drupal site
Among other things, the Bootstrap framework boasts:
- a cool responsive grid system for building designs that perfectly adjust to any screen
- cross-platform compatibility
- a wealth of pre-styled components like buttons, dropdown menus, navigation bars, alerts, badges, etc.
- Javascript plugins for extra functionality
- elements “of the future” like HTML5 and CSS3
- easy integration with other platforms and frameworks
- a choice to easily work with SASS, LESS or CSS
- quicker development thanks to ready coding blocks
- excellent documentation with examples
- frequent and consistent framework updates
- a very helpful open-source community
A bridge between Drupal and Bootstrap: the special Bootstrap Drupal theme
To make it easier to use Bootstrap on your Drupal website, there is a simple solution — the Bootstrap Theme for Drupal. The theme builds a bridge between the two frameworks.
Right on your Drupal admin screen, you will have plenty of Bootstrap’s features to use without a single line of code. The theme has stable releases both for Drupal 7 and Drupal 8.
The Bootstrap Drupal also is one of the best responsive themes with great opportunities for customization. So it is no wonder it stays at the top of drupal.org’s most downloaded themes rankings with over 900 thousand downloads (almost a million!).
The Bootstrap Drupal theme offers:
- support for Bootswatch to let you choose from a bunch of ready free templates
- jsDelivr CDN for enhanced styling and faster loading
- support for Glyphicons through Icon API
- theme settings like Navbar, Tooltips, Breadcrumbs, Popovers
- extensive integration for the framework’s CSS, JavaScript and Components
- detailed documentation
100% customization: creating a Drupal Bootstrap subtheme
To truly avoid limits to your customization, you can take the Bootstrap theme and create your own subtheme. For this purpose, the theme provides a ready "bootstrap_subtheme" folder. All you need is to download the basic theme from drupal.org, create your subtheme and then customize it.
The process of creating a Bootstrap subtheme in Drupal 8 is described in detail in a technical blog post by one of the developers who has done lots of projects with Drudesk and InternetDevels team.
If you are inspired to add Bootstrap to your Drupal 7 or Drupal 8 website, it can happen quickly and easily, if you entrust it to Drudesk’s front-end magicians. Tell us what you expect from your website’s looks and interactivity, and we will enjoy creating it for you!