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by happypeter 4857 days ago
After 6 month joy and pain, I finally give up using Bootstrap.

It's very obvious that smart people are using BS to build cool site like khanacademy, it's well designed, and it's one of the best CSS framework you can find. But...

But for a CSS beginner like me, it's a bit too magical, I wasted a lot of time debugging, I wished I could conquer the complexity, so I tried for 6 months, and now I give up with regret.

Bootstrap(or maybe I should say CSS frameworks) is slowing down my development for the past 6 month or so, if you are a front-end newbie, be warned!

3 comments

If you have a few spare minutes of time, I'd be really interested to hear more detail about this - what problems you faced, what you felt was unclear, and what you felt was complex. My email's in my profile if you'd be willing to discuss.

CSS frameworks should be speeding up development, not slowing them down so if there's something we can do to make them more accessible, we should find out what that is!

Thx for your attention.

I think I am now easily annoyed when people trying to hide complexity from me, and their creature does not work out of the box. Which makes it really hard to fix bugs. And just think how cumbersome it is to overwrite all the variables to get a new navbar look!

So now I think I prefer some https://github.com/styleguide/css stuff, plus some really easy to use widgets with good design taste stuff.

No more hide and find games, I am tired!

Just adding my voice to earlier requests for you to expand on your experiences with Bootstrap. I am more of a database developer and have never mastered CSS. I can hack it, thats about it. My initial thoughts were that Bootstrap is going to solve my lack of front-end programming skills.
I think I am going through the same troubles as you.

What' the alternative? Foundation?

I am going to learn bootsrap because at this point it is the coin of the realm - inspiring other frameworks pros/cons and the # of addons and modifications is just growing too rapidly to ignore.

As above in my reply to the parent, if you've got a few minutes available to discuss the troubles you had, I'd love to hear from you.
I actually prefer Foundation to Bootstrap