Developers Corner: A Quick Look At Twitter Bootstrap v3

Developers Corner

I’m a big fan of Twitter Bootstrap. For those who don’t know what this is, Bootstrap is a front-end framework made by the kind people over at Twitter. I used Boostrap in PHP for my first time back in 2011 and since then I’ve never looked back. Bootstrap is powerful, fast, and always getting better.

Which brings me to the topic of this Developers Corner, the latest version of this bad boy, Bootstrap 3. While not all the additions to Bootstrap have been announced yet, there are a few highlights that I think most developers will be excited about. In general this is a smaller update than from Bootstrap v1 to v2, but I think they’re focused on refining something already great vs. making something great from scratch.

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Here’s what’s new in Boostrap 3:

Mobile – mobile used to be an added option, now it’s standard. It makes sense since you can no longer ignore the fact that a big chunk of your traffic is going to come from mobile devices.

URL Change – everything is finally moving from GitHub to GetBootstrap.com, about darn time! It’s been annoying to go to twitter.github.com/bootstrap and took quite a while to remember, GetBootstrap.com is a lot easier…of course Bootstrap.com would be the best.

Goodbye IE7 and Firefox 3.x – see ya’ wouldn’t want to be ya’. But seriously, nobody uses old versions of these browsers any more so I see no loss here.

Licensing moves from Apache to MIT – I don’t see this having any impact outside of sounding a bit cooler. Something tells me there’s some lawyer somewhere that is happier because of this but I don’t think this has much impact on the dev community.

You can read more about all the bells and whistles in Boostrap 3 on Twitter’s official Bootstrap 3 Plans blog post. Oh and if you want to see all the cool things people are doing with Bootstrap make sure to look at the new Bootstrap Expo.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton