TJohns.co

I'm talking specifically about Joomla & WordPress pre-fabricated templates that use the Bootstrap framework.

I hate bootstrap.  It's generic.  Very generic.  And as a developer, there's nothing I hate more than going to work on a site built by some amateur using a free or premium WordPress template - where bootstrap was used. And seeing all the unnecessary styles piled on top of each other over and over.  It's a giant mess.  Tons and tons of classes and styles crammed into elements everywhere.  Nothing comes out the way expected on the front end until you override the bootstrap styles.  It makes a mess out of what could be a nice clean template.

In my opinion, it's for amateurs that don't want to learn how to make it look the way they want by themselves.  It was created by developers at Twitter.  It has one thing in common with Twitter... it's unnecessary.

It's resource heavy.  All those extra styles can slow down your website some.  And page load speed is important to me as well as your site visitors.  This can be more of a factor when your users are on mobile devices.

Another point... it's a giant pain to make your site perfect on mobile devices until you, once again, override all those crappy bootstrap styles.

Lately, everyone and their mom are using bootstrap.  So, maybe you want your website to look like everyone else's... then go ahead and use bootstrap.  Like I said earlier... it's as generic as it gets.  If you want to get creative, expect it to take more time and work than if you started out without bootstrap and used your creativity from the beginning of the front end development.

So, in summary, here's my bullet list of why you should use bootstrap...

It's generic, looks like other websites (even malicious ones).
It will make unique styling of your site much more time-consuming.
It will make the 'guts' of your site ugly and non-conforming with some HTML standards.
It will be more resource-heavy, slowing down your website.

So, I have to say it again... BOOTSTRAP SUCKS!

Want an example out of 100s of example I could throw up here as to why bootstrap sucks?  Here you go.  I installed an extension the other day and decided to see what it looked like with 'bootstrap template enabled'.  Broke all kinds of things on the site outside of the extension.  Here's just one of the styles it implements:

li {
  line-height: 20px;
}

Why the hell would those idiots that designed this menace think that I want all my line heights throughout the entire site to be 20 pixels?  Because the developers that created bootstrap are lazy pieces of crap.  They could have easily added an extra class.  People put all kinds of things in line items.  Not just bullet lists.  That's just one example.  

Bootstrap was created by the toddler amateur programmers at Twitter.  Twitter is grade school garbage.  And so is the piece of diarrhea called bootstrap that came out of that hole.

This doesn't mean I won't work on bootstrap sites; I do every day.  But I just think it's a another crappy framework.

By the way... My favorite CMS, Joomla, now comes with Bootstrap integrated into the back & front end.  I WISH I could have just 5 minutes in a room with the Joomla decision makers that decided to do this to a near perfect CMS.  I'd cut off their fingers so they can't develop in Bootstrap, remove their mouths so they no longer have input into what goes into Joomla, and remove their eyes so they can't see how terrible Bootstrap looks since their taste is obviously so horribly poor.  When I develop custom templates now, the first thing I do is get rid of that crappy kindergarten Twitter dorks' Bootstrap mess.

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