Monday, January 26, 2015

Dropping Bootstrap for Patternfly

Bootstrap is a godsend to single developers who suck at design. It had everything from components to simple animations for that eye candy.

And then things messy when that developer finds "themes" for bootstrap like the free ones over that bootswatch or the high-end stuff over at wrapbootstrap. I'm not saying these things are bad but all to often developers don't have the "design disciple" to use these themes. As developers, we have this tendency to use all the features, colors, suggested layout, etc.; user experience not withstanding. I'm guilty of this. We end up with this "soup" of a website or web app that's full of fancy animations and inconsistent visual design.

I think the fix for this is a set of guidelines that developers can happily follow and this is where patternfly comes in. Pattenfly is built on bootstrap so developers already using bootstrap will have no problem using it.

The nice things with Patternfly:

  1. No more trawling the net for lay-outing advice (https://www.patternfly.org/wikis/layout-templates/)
  2. Common design patterns done (https://www.patternfly.org/wikis/patterns/loginlogout/)
  3. Shitload of widgets, visual widgets and fonts
  4. And it's free; github here.