What's new with Bootstrap 5?
After working on several CSS libraries or frameworks such as Semantic UI, Material Design and Bulma CSS, I am back using Bootstrap. I have plenty of experience with this outstanding library especially using it with paid commercial themes. However, for the past two to three years, I've been mostly working on the backend or on the logical aspect of web development such as building data for pivot tables and integrating payment solutions in eCommerce Sites.
For the moment, I have the opportunity of coding again with Bootstrap and probably sooner or later with the latest version version 5 (as of this writing).
Why use Bootstrap for front-end web development?
- easy to install and use, providing hundreds of cross browser components out of the box
- with SASS, you can configure your variables, layouts, responsive breakpoints and colours
- this provides consistency throughout your site or application
- you don't need to master JavaScript to start using it today
- there are hundreds of free and open source third party extensions to build on this framework
Bootstrap version 4 already brought some interesting changes such as:
- SASS integration
- Card component
- flexbox integration
Changes on Bootstrap version 5:
- drop use of JQuery
- use of Responsive Font Sizes such as REM
- use of Vanilla JavaScript
There are plenty of other changes as you can read more here.
Productivity
For me, what's makes Bootstrap a highly productive framework is the amount of code snippets readily and freely available on the Internet for almost all sort of UI layouts, which you can easily adapt to your design. For example, when I have to implement a card design, I can visit sites like Bootstrapious and check for similar designs. I copy paste the code snippets before editing them to match the intended UI.
References