Themestrap
Themestrap is a simple starter kit for constructing Twitter Bootstrap 3+ themes. It provides the skeleton for a simple, maintainable theme that always uses code directly from Bootstrap with as little replacement as possible.
Themestrap's Philosophy
- A theme should be built on top of the framework, with as little intrusive change as possible.
- As the framework evolves, a theme should be easily updated to the latest version.
To this end, Themestrap provides you with two simple files to modify: variables.less
and theme.less (both in the less
directory). You can tweak any and all of the Bootstrap variables
in variables.less and support any additional code or classes you'd like in theme.less. The compiled
theme CSS includes the Bootstrap library and will automatically pick up any overrides from variables.
Creating a Theme with Themestrap
To create a theme, first start by cloning the Themestrap repository into a directory named for
your theme. We recommend a bootstrap-theme-THEME_NAME
naming scheme:
git clone https://github.com/divshot/themestrap.git bootstrap-theme-THEME_NAME
Next, you should open bower.json
and change the package name from bootstrap-theme-themestrap
to match what you want your theme to be named. Now you're ready to install dependencies using
Grunt and Bower (you must have these
installed).
npm install
bower install
Now you're ready to go! Simply edit less/variables.less
and less/theme.less
to your liking.
When you're ready, just run grunt
and it will compile and minify the distribution for you.
You can also run grunt watch
to automatically compile as you work.
Testing Out Your Theme
We've provided a "Bootstrap Kitchen Sink" HTML file at examples/kitchen-sink.html
that contains
all of the various components in all of their variations. It may not be 100% exhaustive but it
should give you a good idea of what your theme will look like at a glance.
You can start a development server at http://localhost:8000
by running grunt serve
. Your theme will automatically compile while the server is running.
Deeper Customization
In cases where you need to do a more in-depth overhaul of a portion of Bootstrap's LESS, you may do so by
simply copying over a file from Bootstrap's less
directory into your theme's less
directory and then
modifying it as necessary. Example:
cp bower_components/bootstrap/less/alerts.less less/alerts.less
Because it takes path priority over the Bower-installed Bootstrap LESS, it will automatically override the
Bootstrap default. In fact, this is how variables.less
works already...delete it and the default Bootstrap
variables will be back in play.
Releasing Your Theme
Before you release your theme, you should do a few things:
- Make sure that you've updated the package name in
bower.json
and filled out your name, the theme name and GitHub repo info - Check the
index.html
file β it is generated using the information you supplied inbower.json
. To change it to suit your needs, edit the template/pages/index.html
. - Update the
README.md
file to be about your theme
Once you've done that, you should push it up to GitHub. The repository
is already designed to be released directly onto GitHub Pages without an additional intermediary,
so if you push to the gh-pages
branch you should have a nice way to show off your theme!
Also consider registering a Bower package.
If you do, remove the "private": true
property from bower.json
.
The Themestrap Gallery
We've created a gallery of themes built with Themestrap. If you have created a theme and want to add it to the gallery, just make a pull request to the gh-pages branch of this repository.
Copyright and license
Copyright 2013 Divshot, Inc. under the Apache 2.0 license.