BootSwatchr News

Major Changes Coming, and BootSwatchr 2

Fri, 24 May 2013 23:33:00 -0400

It’s been a minute since I have given you all an update on what I have in store for the next version of BootSwatchr. The fact of the matter is that I have been very busy working on a project with NOAA and taking a new position with Pearson. Also, some friends and I are working on something we hope will be good for everyone.

I have, however, continued to plan for Bootstrap 3, and improve Bootswatchr in ways that have been suggested by you, the users, as well as several improvements I have found will be better for BootSwatchr in the long run. Here’s the overview:

I have never been in love with the idea of using form inputs to edit the LESS variables individually. It was an early decision I made as a product of “get it working and ship it.” I’m not claiming that BootSwatchr was the first app for customizing Bootstrap, but since it’s launch I have seen quite a few new apps use this same mechanism, and frankly, I’m not happy that it’s become a standard. I will be fixing this.
The central database is going away. This is being done to keep BootSwatchr free. BootSwatchr’s popularity has unfortunately created a TON of data, and while I have managed to scale the application to meet demand, I haven’t been able to do so in a cost-effective way.
RTL has been an important feature for many of you. Kiarash and I have been working with @mdo and @fat to get RTL included as a feature of Bootstrap 3, so over time, this feature will not be a part of BootSwatchr since it’ll be in Bootstrap.

Some of you might note that I also mentioned BootSwatchr 2. Technically, the very first version of BootSwatchr was based on DATGui, and was a very early beta prototype. After iterating through it for a while, and given the significance of the changes in the next version, I feel that this new version is really more of a major update.

Stay tuned, I will be releasing a preview of the new BootSwatchr soon, and I plan on a full release this summer.

Bootstrap 2.3.0 RTL Live

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 22:06:13 -0500

The Right to Left conversion of Bootstrap by Kiarash is now live.

Bootstrap 2.3.0 Added

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 12:25:30 -0500

Bootstrap 2.3 was released yesterday, and I am happy to announce that it is now the default version used for BootSwatchr. Bootstrap versions back to 2.0.4 continue to be supported and I am working on the version 3.0 upgrade so that hopefully BootSwatchr will be ready the day that drops.

Bootstrap 2.2.2 is Live in BootSwatchr

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 12:40:03 -0500

Bootstrap 2.2.2 brings a lot of bug fixes for bootstrap into play, and is now the default version of Bootstrap used by BootSwatchr. The RTL version of 2.2.2 is still on the way, but the 2.2.1 CSS is still completely compatible with the 2.2.2 javascript.

This one took a little longer to get done done, but no to actually do. I spent this weekend working at a hackathon, the goal of which was to get highschool and middle-school kids more interested in programming. While Bootstrap released 2.2.2 on the 8th, I was pretty slammed that day, and basically asleep all day on the 9th. Hackathons are a blast, but they definitely take a toll on the ammount of sleep you are going to get that weekend.

Swatch-on Swatchers!

Gallery is Back

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 22:06:20 -0500

It may seem silly, but as part of the new Gallery, I had to do an admin section. Took a little bit of time, but absolutely worth it.

Want to get your Bootswatch in the Gallery? There’s a button in the top right corner of the create tool that will let. You’ll need to provide a theme name and an email address, but the email address will only be used in reviewing your Bootswatch.

Return of the Gallery

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 11:28:55 -0500

Several of you have pointed out the disappearance of the gallery in BootSwatchr. Long story short, I did it wrong the first time, and it was causing all sorts of problems for everyone.

Very soon, I will have a much better version of the gallery to release. The one caveat is that you won’t be able to immediately send a theme to the gallery. the process I use to generate thumbnails of the themes, and full size renderings, takes up quite a bit more RAM then the server allows, and this is unfortunately the biggest server BootSwatchr can afford.

To that effect, the new process is that you nominate your own theme to the gallery, I will pick it up, review it, and generate the images for it locally, and upload them to the site. I have put a lot of time and thought into this, and it seems to me to be the ideal solution.

TL;DR: Gallery is coming back. Stay tuned.

Gradients in BootSwatchr

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 10:54:10 -0500

Twtterist Jason (@mp3tricord) got a hold of me to ask a question with a pretty straight forward answer. “How would you go about adding a gradient background color or texture to a bootswatchr theme? Seems bootstrap not compat?”

Glad you asked Jason. The short answer is that there is no obvious way of doing this. The long answer, append LESS.

In the bootswatchr tool, I have provided you with two open text fields, Append LESS and prepend LESS. Essentially, you want to define an override for a class inside of append LESS so that it gets tacked on to the bottom of the style sheet. For example, this snippet adds a green gradient to the hero-unit.

.hero-unit{
  background-image: linear-gradient(bottom, rgb(101,164,81) 7%, rgb(132,197,114) 54%, rgb(159,237,149) 77%);
  background-image: -o-linear-gradient(bottom, rgb(101,164,81) 7%, rgb(132,197,114) 54%, rgb(159,237,149) 77%);
  background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(bottom, rgb(101,164,81) 7%, rgb(132,197,114) 54%, rgb(159,237,149) 77%);
  background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(bottom, rgb(101,164,81) 7%, rgb(132,197,114) 54%, rgb(159,237,149) 77%);
  background-image: -ms-linear-gradient(bottom, rgb(101,164,81) 7%, rgb(132,197,114) 54%, rgb(159,237,149) 77%);

  background-image: -webkit-gradient(
    linear,
    left bottom,
    left top,
    color-stop(0.07, rgb(101,164,81)),
    color-stop(0.54, rgb(132,197,114)),
    color-stop(0.77, rgb(159,237,149))
  );
}

For help building cross browser CSS3 gradients, see http://gradients.glrzad.com/

Bootstrap 2.2.1 Added

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 11:00:58 -0400

In reality, the LESS from Bootstrap 2.2.0 didn’t change for Bootstrap 2.2.1, so instead we dropped support for 2.2.0 and added 2.2.1 instead. That being said, a 2.2.1 theme is completely compatible with 2.2.0

Previews

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 17:13:00 -0400

For a while now I have been kicking around the idea of adding a “custom preview” option to the tool, so that you could preview your BootSwatchr theme against any Bootstrap based page you can hit with your browser. This means the page doesn’t even have to be public yet, but as long as your browser can get to it, you can use it to for a preview.

Any other previews that should be added whil I’m at it? I’m looking for suggestions from the community, and every suggestion will be considered. Ultimately, I will only add a few, but if you know of a really good Bootstrap page, and you think it would make a good preview, let me know, leave a comment.

Bootstrap 2.2.0 Added

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 12:57:39 -0400

BootSwatchr received a quick update this morning for the release of Bootstrap 2.2.0. 2.2.0 will now be the default version of Bootstrap used for all new BootSwatchr themes.

To upgrade your theme, simply load it and go to the settings tab, then switch the theme version to 2.2.0. For users looking for RTL for 2.2.0, that should be available some time tomorrow. Right now, the RTL for 2.2.0 is actually the RTL for 2.1.1.

So far I think this is the fastest I have put together a version upgrade. I would have had this done yesterday, but I was very busy volunteering my time to help with the Hurricane Sandy situation on the east coast. I sincerely hope that everyone affected by this disaster has made it out okay, and that you with family and friends in that part of the country have been able to connect with your loved ones.

Going forward I hope to continue this trend of quick version upgrades, but we never know what curve-balls the Bootstrap team might throw at us. To those of you waiting for this upgrade, thanks for your patience.

Unsaved Changes

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 12:35:00 -0400

@kemie brought this too my attention this morning, and Christian has experienced similar problems.

Bottom line, your changes to individual themes were all saved, but because the database was under incredible load due to a huge influx of traffic from Russia, writes were happening, but they were taking minutes. I threw together a quick write-through cache layer for this and everything seems to be working perfectly.

While the speed has greatly improved (a single write now takes less than a second, as it should) the speed isn’t quite where I would like it to be yet, so with that in mind I will focus on increasing the database performance.

For those interested, the major change that happened to kick off this chain of events was the switch to CouchDB on Sunday. Couch is a great product, I simply haven’t used it in such a write-heavy application before, so there’s a little growing pain to be had.

Good News Everyone!

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 04:32:00 -0400

Some of you may have noticed that BootSwatchr was down for extended periods of time recently. There’s a pretty good reason for that.

When I originally built BootSwatchr, I never expected it would be as popular as it wound up being, and to save some time and effort, I wound up using node-tiny, a small inline doc-store for NodeJS as the data layer for the application. As the tool become more and more popular, I realized that this was going to become a problem of scale sooner than it should have, and unfortunately, that started to happen a lot recently.

I am happy to report that I have upgraded BootSwatchr to use a real database, and managed to do it in a way that no one lost any data. In fact, all the data should already have migrated to the new setup. I did notice that the gallery is a bit slower, but that is something I was looking to clean up a bit anyway.

Having a scale problem like this is a good problem to have. Thanks for making BootSwatchr popular enough to make this a problem.

Missing Hex Entry?

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 11:15:00 -0400

@kemie pointed out to me yesterday that there is now way to enter a hex value for the colors in the palette section of the BootSwatchr Tool. This was in fact supported in versions < 0.9 and I believe it needs to stay in there as a feature.

I will be re-enabling this very soon. I know this can help out a few people, so I’m going to try and do this as quickly as possible, but in the mean time, thank you for your patience. I do really wish I had the means to get new features on to BootSwatchr faster, but it’s just me for the time being.

Version 0.9.5 is Live

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 02:16:17 -0400

Kiarash provided us an updated RTL version of BootStrap for 2.1.1, as well as an accompanying Js file, which can be found right next to the RTL setting in the create tool.

He also provided a preview file that uses the RTL feature in it’s content, which is much more helpful for developers creating a RTL Bootswatch.

Just to remind everyone, BootSwatchr.com is the only place you can find the RTL version of Bootstrap. This feature is not included in stock Bootstrap and is currently not supported by any other customization tool. We get that this isn’t important to everyone, but it’s very important to developers in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Version 0.9.5 is a minor update as we head towards the version 1 release.

Version 0.9.3 is live, Next Steps, and Sponsorship

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 18:11:28 -0400

0.9.3 brings a relatively minor update with it. Bootstrap has been upgraded to version 2.1.1 while support for 2.1.0 and 2.0.4 has been maintained. Along with that, gzip compression and template caching have been enabled to speed up the site and hopefully make it more stable.

More updates to come soon. I will be adding support for adding custom colors to the palette which can then be utilized later as “@color-name”, and I will be making certain elements of the tool more suited to their specific purpose instead of just being text fields to change the LESS variable values with.

As I ramp up to version 1.0, it has dawned on me how incomplete Bootstrap is as a total front-end framework, and how much it can be improved by stripping some features, adding new ones, and most importantly, by adopting a more general architecture making it even easier to theme. I feel that BootSwatchr has helped make great strides in customizing Bootstrap, and adding features that are universally needed to it with the help of other developers internationally, but that the tool can become even better.

I am also looking for sponsors for BootSwatchr. I cannot devote a lot of time to the project, I can only devote less time than I would like to. If you or your company would like to get in front of developers who stay on top of bleeding edge techniques and technology, get a hold of me, and lets work something out. All of my contact information is on my site, http://drewstrickland.com.

BootSwatchr 1.0, Coming Soon

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 21:30:36 -0400

I have been working hard on BootSwatchr 1.0, and with it there will be several improvements:

Speed improvements to the tool - Several people have commented that the tool is slowing down to load and that it can also crash browsers. This is sorted out in 1.0
Full support for Bootstrap 2.04 and 2.1.0 - With the release of Bootstrap 2.1, Bootswatchr has undergone an update, both in look and feel and in functionality to support both bootstrap 2.1 and 2.0.4
RTL support for Bootstrap 2.1 - Kiarash has supplied me with an updated Bootstrap 2.1 RTL edition to support the new RTL features.

After version 1 goes live, I will be adding several new enhancements, including additional support for adding colors, font families, and custom button/alert/navbar classes. These are all features requested by the community and I am happy to oblige.

Stay tuned. The community’s favorite tool for theme-rolling Bootstrap is about to get a lot better.

Version 0.8.5 live

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 00:44:34 -0400

Version 0.8.5 went live today, and brought a pretty significant feature update with it.

RTL Support - At the request of a BootSwatchr user in Iran, web developer Kiarash Soleimanzadeh, BootSwatchr now includes support for using Right-To-Left text instead of Left-To-Right text. While Left-To-Right remains the default (as it is for Bootstrap) This setting can now be toggled using the button right next to the “Responsive” button at the top of the tool.