We’re a few weeks out from v4.1 and we have our first patch release of Bootstrap 4! It’s a straightforward set of bug fixes and build tool quality of life updates.
Here’s a quick rundown of some of the changes:
Added validation styles for file inputs
Improved printing of dark tables
Suppressed that text-hide deprecation notice by default
Fixed an issue where Collapse wasn’t working in Internet Explorer
Cleaned up some JS globals and improve coverage
Bumped dependencies, namely Jekyll
Fixed docs issue with incorrect name for our monospace font utility
Checkout the full v4.1.1 ship list and GitHub project for the full details. Up next will be v4.1.2, another patch release to address the next set of CSS and JS bugs you’ve help share with us since v4 launched.
Two months ago we shipped the first major release of Bootstrap 4 and we’re thrilled y’all love the latest release and our brand new themes so much. Today we’re shipping our first minor release, v4.1! This release comes later than expected and some of the fixes we intended, but there’s still a boatload of fixes, docs updates, build tool changes, and even a few small new features.
Updated docs URL
With the release of v4 stable, we moved to a versioned docs setup, meaning each minor release would bring with it a new hosted version of our docs. This allows folks who haven’t yet upgraded stick to the docs they know and love and avoids breaking URLs across the web. With today’s release, our we’ll have a new URL for this release’s documentation, getbootstrap.com/docs/4.1/. The previous URL, getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/ will still work as y’all would imagine.
Highlights
Here’s what’s new in addition to our bug fixes and docs updates:
Added new custom range form control.
Added new .carousel-fade modifier to switch carousel from horizontal sliding to crossfade.
Added new .dropdown-item-text for plaintext dropdown items.
Added new .flex-fill, .flex-grow-*, and .flex-shrink-* utilities.
Added new .table-borderless variant for tables.
Added new .text-monospace utility.
Added new .text-body (default body color), .text-black-50 (50% opacity black), and .text-white-50 (50% opacity white) utilities.
Added new .shadow-* utilities for quickly adding box-shadows.
Added ability to disable Popper’s positioning in dropdowns.
Updated our Theming docs to confirm you cannot use CSS variables in media queries (sorry folks!).
Fixed longstanding issue with Chrome rendering CSS columns incorrectly for cards.
Deprecated .text-hide—you’ll see a warning during compilation—as it’s a dated and undocumented feature.
Fixed up Dashboard and Offcanvas examples across Firefox and IE.
Breadcrumbs can now use non-string values as dividers.
Be sure to look at the ship list and project board for more details on all our fixes. Also, as a small heads up, we’ve split our issue template on GitHub into two separate templates, one for feature requests and one for bug reports. Please let us know if you have any feedback on the change.
Next release
Next up, we’re looking at a v4.1.1 release. There are some bug fixes for input groups, form fields, and more that I know we need to tackle sooner than later. These were supposed to be in v4.1, but we couldn’t make it happen in time.
Just over a month ago, we shipped the long awaited Bootstrap 4 stable release. With a brand new codebase designed to better support customization with all new components and documentation, it was the perfect time to debut some brand new themes built. Today, we’d like to introduce you to our brand new Bootstrap Themes marketplace.
10 new themes
Over the last several months, we’ve been hard at work with theme creators to build the best themes for you. When we created our original three Bootstrap themes, our goal was to provide the best themes, build tools, documentation, and support to everyone building with Bootstrap. With today’s update, we’re adding 10 new themes to the mix from a global community of designers and developers.
Every theme is built on Bootstrap 4 (stable, no beta or alpha here!) and comes with its own build tools and customer support. Prices are set by creators with pricing that incentivizes unique and well supported themes. Collectively, this inaugural batch of theme developers have built themes used by over 500,000 people. We’re excited to grow our Themes user base, push the boundaries of premium themes, and help everyone bring their ideas to life on the web.
Our new marketplace isn’t just for buying themes. If you’re a theme creator, we’d love to work with you to include your themes or to build new exclusive themes. We’re looking for new creators to design and build high quality themes, provide first class documentation and support, and help create unique experiences built on Bootstrap.
It’s literally taken us years to do it, but Bootstrap 4 has finally arrived! Words cannot begin to describe the elation the entire team and I have for this release, but I’ll do my best. Thank you to everyone, especially to the team, and to everyone who’s contributed code in a pull request or opened an issue. Thank you.
Since our last beta, we’ve been hard at work stabilizing a few key pieces of our CSS, polishing our documentation, adding some extra surprises, and planning for our follow-up releases. We still have some kinks to iron out, but nothing’s going to stop us from shipping a stable release.
Want to know more before hitting the docs? Great, let’s dive in!
What’s new
There are no breaking changes since our last beta, but we have made some key improvements and resolved some tricky bugs.
Print styles and utility classes have been updated. We’ve improved how printed pages are rendered to ensure pages are reasonably sized instead of rendering them as mobile devices. Print display utilities also include a whole slew of new display values to match our standard display utilities.
Additive border utilities have been added (e.g., .border-top) and default to a solid 1px light gray border. Now it’s easier to quickly add all borders or a subset of borders to your components.
Our $spacers and $sizes Sass maps have been updated to allow more customization the same way our color maps work. You can now add, remove, or replace all your key-value pairs consistently across our CSS. Head to our Theming docs for more information and examples.
Added documentation to our Theming docs for using our provided CSS variables for those are living on the edge and don’t want to use Sass.
Added responsive .order-0 and .order-last classes for more control over the flexbox grid.
In addition, we’ve made plenty of improvements to reusing and extending variables and general code cleanup. But, that’s still not everything.
New examples
Nearly every example has been overhauled for our stable v4 release. We’ve removed a couple outdated examples, added brand new ones, and really overhauled a few others.
Here’s the rundown of changes to each:
You’ve likely already seen our Album example, but it’s been updated for this release to include more content in our photo cards and improved mobile rendering.
Pricing is brand new with this release and is a fully custom page built with our utilities and card components. It’s responsive and easily extended.
Checkout is a brand new, extensive form example featuring all the best parts of our form layouts, validation styles, grid, and more.
Product is also new and is a cheeky riff on Apple-style marketing pages, largely built with only our utility classes. Don’t take it too seriously!
Blog has been rewritten from the ground up. Gone is the two column blue header layout. We’ve built a snarky magazine-style layout with featured posts and responsive navigation.
Dashboard has been overhauled as well to feature a live ChartJS example, includes a refreshed sidebar with Feather icons, and is semi-responsive.
Floating labels is brand new and builds on our sign-in example to provide a CSS-only implementation of the floating input label. This one’s experimental and may see major changes before we bring it to Bootstrap proper.
Finally, Offcanvas has been rewritten from the ground up to show off a navbar-built drawer, horizontal scrolling navigation, and some custom lists built on media object and utilities.
Cover, Carousel, Sign-in, and our framework examples only saw minor updates to improve code quality and fix a few smaller bugs. Overall this was a huge update for our examples and I’m excited to iterate on these and add more in future releases.
Documenting our approach
New with v4 stable is a brief overview of some of the guiding principles behind why we do the things we do in Bootstrap. Our intent is to distill and document all the things we keep in our heads while writing code, building linters, and debugging. Much of this is focused on concepts and strategies for writing responsive CSS, using simple selectors, and limiting how much JavaScript one needs to write.
Check out the new Approach page, and be sure to open an issue or pull request with feedback and suggestions on what else to cover.
Known issues
No release fixes every bug, and the same can be said for our v4 stable release. Here’s some of the things that we’re looking to tackle first in either a minor release (v4.1) or a patch release (v4.0.1) as time and scope allow.
Input groups, validation, and rounded corners. I rewrote this for Beta 3 and I thought nailed it, but I was mistaken. We have some rounded corner issues and the only way we can fix them with CSS without breaking backward compatibility is by limiting how extensible the component can be made. We may need a modifier class to avoid some gnarly CSS and satisfy all the key functionality. Check out the issue and cross-linked PR for more details.
Table variants, in particular .table-active, have a weird selector we’ve unintentionally left linger since prior releases. The bug results in double application of an rgba() background color—once for the <tr> and once for any <td>/<th> elements within.
There are a few more issues not yet confirmed or slated for our first patch release, but expect a handful of fixes coming your way before we hit the next minor release. We’ll likely also package up the default branch change for our repository in this next patch release. We didn’t have time to fit in testing a merge of a hugely divergent code base without nuking the entire Git history of v3. Again, more on that soon.
Next releases
Speaking of releases, we’re excited about the momentum we have going for us. Our GitHub project boards are mostly up to date on upcoming releases, so feel free to jump in and take a look. Our next release will be v4.1 (pending any bugfix patches) and will focus on a slew of small new features, utilities, responsive font sizes, and more. From there we have a couple more minor releases that rally around another group of features.
We aim to make RTL part of an upcoming minor release depending on overall scope. It’s taken us far too long to commit to this, but we’re on it. Our current plan is focused on implementing this into our build tools and components so you conditionally serve, for example, bootstrap.min.css or bootstrap-rtl.min.css. Weigh in on the open issue please with any feedback; when we’re ready, we’ll tee up a fresh pull request with help from the community.
It’s worth reiterating that each minor release will bring a new hosted version of our documentation. Right now, we have getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/ and come v4.1’s release, we’ll have that plus getbootstrap.com/docs/4.1/. Prior releases will continue to be linked from our navigation as is already the case for v3.x and the last v4 alpha.
Themes update
Bootstrap Themes are getting a major update this year! We’ve been absolutely thrilled with the response since we originally launched Bootstrap Themes and we’re finally ready to share our plans for what’s next.
For the past few months, we’ve been working with some amazing theme creators to bring their awesome work to the Official Bootstrap Themes store. We couldn’t be more excited to announce we’re expanding Bootstrap Themes to include ten brand new themes. We’re currently targeting a first quarter launch with themes all built on Bootstrap 4 (sorry, no v3 for these). Depending on final reviews, we might even get them to y’all in the coming weeks.
So much of Bootstrap’s reach and usefulness comes directly from designers, developers, and creators all over the world building businesses with and on top of Bootstrap. We want to use our platform to give these creators an even larger audience and provide y’all with the best Bootstrap team-approved themes.
Stay tuned for more information as we get ready to launch.
Thank you
Finally, one last thank you to everyone who’s contributed to Bootstrap 4. It’s been a crazy journey and I’m personally relieved, thrilled, and anxious to call it stable. There have been roughly 6,000 commits to v4 since we first starting working on it back in 2015. We’ve gone every which direction and rewrote far too many things far too many times, but I’m so very happy and fortunate with where we landed.
Cheers once again to everyone who’s contributed to and built with Bootstrap. It’s an honor to be building these kind of tools alongside and for all of you.
Welcome to the final beta of v4! It’s been over two months since we shipped our second beta and we’ve been busy making the last breaking changes before moving to our next stable release, v4.0.0! We have a few more breaking changes than we were planning, but fret not, we’ve detailed them all.
Beta 3 primarily focuses around our forms, but it also includes key fixes to tables, some global styles, our documentation, and some JavaScript bugs. Following this release, we’ll address a few issues and PRs before doing a stable v4 release a week or two into the New Year.
Let’s dive into all the highlights.
Breaking changes
As mentioned in our Beta 2 release, we needed to make a few more breaking changes in Beta 3. We’ve summarized them here and in our migration docs—be sure to read them!
Rewrote native and custom check controls. Both browser default and custom checkboxes and radios now have simpler markup after removing the <input> from the <label>. Now, all checkboxes and radios have a parent <div> and sibling <input> and <label> pair. This is essential for form validation and disabled inputs because we can use the input’s state to style the label.
In addition, custom checkbox and radio elements no longer have a .custom-control-indicator. This is generated from the new .custom-control-label.
Input groups were rewritten with specific .input-group-{prepend|append} classes. The new approach allows us to support validation styles and messages within input groups, while also adding support for custom selects, custom file inputs, and multiple .form-controls.
Responsive tables are once again parent classes to avoid accessiblity issues with changing a <table>’s display.
Deleted the .col-form-legend class, consolidating it’s styles into the .col-form-label class.
In addition to the breaking changes, we’ve addressed a few more general issues that may impact your project.
Restored cursor: pointer to non-disabled links, buttons, .close, navbar toggler, and pagination links.
Added a new vertically centered modal option with .modal-dialog-centered.
Added new dropleft and dropright variants for dropdowns in #23860.
Our npm package no longer includes any files other than our source and dist JavaScript and CSS files. If you previously relied on our running our scripts via the node_modules folder, you’ll need to update your build tools.
Print styles have moved to bottom of the import stack to properly override styles.
Stable v4.0.0 is our next release and we already have a GitHub project board to track issues and PRs. There will be no breaking changes from Beta 3 to stable, so our changelog should be short and sweet. Expect some linting, Sass variable improvements, updated docs Examples, and more build tool improvements.
With our next release, the master branch will once again become our default branch. We’ll merge v4-dev into master, meaning v3’s source code will only be in our v3-dev branch and past releases.
