Bootstrap and WordPress are highly popular: 3.7 websites on the internet are built with Bootstrap and 29% of the web uses WordPress. Clearly, knowing how to build websites and apps using these two robust and mature, open-source technologies can be a valuable skill for developers in the workplace
Why WordPress?
WordPress is open-source software you can use to create a beautiful website, blog or app.
The popularity of WordPress is mostly due to its ease of use and powerful options for appearance, customization, and extensibility (via themes and plugins).
Thanks to WordPress themes, webmasters with little to no coding experience can power their websites with a professional appearance and custom functionality. Users can easily select different themes with a few clicks using the Appearance menu in the administration dashboard or copy theme files directly into the wp-content themes folder. Themes can be purchased from dedicated marketplaces, individual developers, or can also be freely installed from the WordPress.org themes directory.
As developers, we can create our own theme, which is what we’re going to do in this tutorial. More specifically, we’re going to perform the key steps towards building a simple WordPress theme that integrates the latest release of the Bootstrap library.
Why Bootstrap?
Bootstrap is a robust and comprehensive UI library for developing responsive and mobile-first websites and apps. Here are some advantages of using Bootstrap as the styling framework for a WordPress theme.
You will need a Dedicated or Managed WordPress Hosting
Advantages of Using Bootstrap and WordPress Themes Together
In my view, there are many advantages of using Bootstrap to style a WordPress theme.
# Bootstrap is a popular, open-source project with extensive development and continuous maintenance, which over time has resulted in fewer bugs.
# It’s a cross-browser framework that supports major browsers with a good CSS baseline called [Reboot]
# It has an extensive and thorough documentation.
# It deals with reset, grids, typography, utilities, and media queries, thereby freeing up development time.
# It’s widely used by developers to style websites, so it’s easy to find tutorials, demos, and open-source projects to learn from or extend.
Bootstrap can be used to quickly create a mobile-first and mobile-optimized WordPress theme without reinventing the wheel.
# There are tons of starter themes made available by the community, such as Understrap, which aim to provide a quick starting point for developers to create WordPress themes with Bootstrap.
# Although it’s not created with WordPress in mind, Bootstrap can be easily integrated with WordPress.
# We can easily customize Bootstrap to meet specific project requirements, once we have enough knowledge of the available classes.
# We can take advantage of hundreds of JavaScript/jQuery plugins already integrated with Bootstrap.
# Starting with Bootstrap 4, plugins use modern ES6.
# With the release of Bootstrap 4, the library now uses Sass instead of Less as the preprocessor of choice, which makes it more widely compatible with a huge number of developer workflows.
# Bootstrap 4 introduces new components such as the card component. Bootstrap cards make it easy to create a modern, card-based layout such as the Masonry-style interface.
# The Bootstrap 4 grid system is built on top of flexbox, which makes the grid even more flexible, developer-friendly and clean.
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