Bootstrap 3.3.6 is here! It’s a long overdue release that addresses dozens of CSS bug fixes and documentation updates. We’ve had over 180 commits and 100 closed issues and pull requests from nearly 30 contributors since our last release. Woohoo!
Here are some of the highlights:
Added support for an official NuGet package (yeah, it’s an old one, but folks still use it!).
Enabled source maps for our compiled minified CSS.
Updated over a dozen browser bug entries as browsers continue to fix bugs (aww yeah!).
Updated several JavaScript plugin docs to clarify usage.
Made local documentation development easier with a local jQuery fallback.
Today is a special day for Bootstrap. Not only is it our fourth birthday, but after a year of development, we’re finally shipping the first alpha release of Bootstrap 4. Hell yeah!
Bootstrap 4 has been a massive undertaking that touches nearly every line of code. We’re stoked to share it with you and hear your feedback. We’ve got a lot of news to share with you, so let’s jump right into it.
What’s new
There are a ton of major changes to Bootstrap and it’s impossible to cover them all in detail here, so here are some of our favorite highlights:
Moved from Less to Sass. Bootstrap now compiles faster than ever thanks to LibSass, and we join an increasingly large community of Sass developers.
Improved grid system. We’ve added a new grid tier to better target mobile devices and completely overhauled our semantic mixins.
Opt-in flexbox support is here. The future is now—switch a boolean variable and recompile your CSS to take advantage of a flexbox-based grid system and components.
Dropped wells, thumbnails, and panels for cards. Cards are a brand new component to Bootstrap, but they’ll feel super familiar as they do nearly everything wells, thumbnails, and panels did, only better.
Consolidated all our HTML resets into a new module, Reboot. Reboot steps in where Normalize.css stops, giving you more opinionated resets like box-sizing: border-box, margin tweaks, and more all in a single Sass file.
Brand new customization options. Instead of relegating style embellishments like gradients, transitions, shadows, and more to a separate stylesheet like v3, we’ve moved all those options into Sass variables. Want default transitions on everything or to disable rounded corners? Simply update a variable and recompile.
Dropped IE8 support and moved to rem and em units. Dropping support for IE8 means we can take advantage of the best parts of CSS without being held back with CSS hacks or fallbacks. Pixels have been swapped for rems and ems where appropriate to make responsive typography and component sizing even easier. If you need IE8 support, keep using Bootstrap 3.
Rewrote all our JavaScript plugins. Every plugin has been rewritten in ES6 to take advantage of the newest JavaScript enhancements. They also now come with UMD support, generic teardown methods, option type checking, and tons more.
Improved auto-placement of tooltips and popovers thanks to the help of a library called Tether.
Improved documentation. We rewrote it all in Markdown and added a few handy plugins to streamline examples and code snippets to make working with our docs way easier. Improved search is also on its way.
And tons more! Custom form controls, margin and padding classes, new utility classes, and more have also been included.
And that barely scratches the surface of the 1,100 commits and 120,000 lines of changes in v4 so far. Plus, we’re not even done yet!
We need your help to make Bootstrap 4 the best it can be. Starting today, the source code for v4 will be available in a v4-dev branch on GitHub. In addition, we have a v4 development and tracking pull request that includes a master checklist of changes we’ve made and our remaining possible todos. We’d love for y’all to help chip away at those todos.
The general development and release plan looks something like this:
A few alpha releases while things are still in flux.
Two beta releases after features and functionality are locked down to really test things out.
Two release candidates (RCs) to really test things out closer to production environments.
Then, the final release!
For those jamming on v4 with us, we also have a dedicated v4 Slack channel. Jump in to talk shop and work with your fellow Bootstrappers. If you haven’t yet, join our official Slack room!.
If you’re not keen on pushing code to v4, we’d love to hear from you in our issue tracker with bug reports, questions, and general feedback.
Supporting v3
When we shipped Bootstrap 3, we immediately discontinued all support for v2.x, causing a lot of pain for all our users out there. That was a mistake we won’t be making again. For the foreseeable future, we’ll be maintaining Bootstrap 3 with critical bug fixes and documentation improvements. v3 docs will also continue to be hosted after v4’s final release.
One more thing…
In addition to shipping the first Bootstrap 4 alpha today, we’re also launching our latest side project, Official Bootstrap Themes.
We’ve talked about building premium themes for Bootstrap since our earliest releases, but never quite found the time or ideal approach until earlier this year. We’ve poured hundreds of hours into these themes and consider them to be much more than traditional re-skins of Bootstrap. They’ve very much their own toolkits, just like Bootstrap.
To start, we’re launching with three themes built on Bootstrap 3: a dashboard, an application, and a marketing site. Each theme contains everything you’d find in Bootstrap, plus stunning real world examples, brand new components and plugins, custom documentation, and simple build tools.
All themes include a multiple-use license for the purchaser and free updates for bug fixes and documentation updates for the life of the themes.
Say hello to our newest bot, No Carrier. Inspired by the classic modem disconnection error message of yesteryear, No Carrier helps us track issues that appear to have been abandoned by the original poster. Issues that go without a reply to our questions for two weeks are closed with a friendly explanation by No Carrier.
To date, we’ve handled abandoned issues just like any other issues—with ad-hoc reviews. We felt that could be improved, so we made a bot to automate the process. No Carrier appears on our issue tracker as @twbs-closer and will monitor issues we tag with awaiting-reply. Should no one reply within two weeks, @twbs-closer will post a final comment explaining the situation and our policy, and then automatically close the issue. If someone later replies after the cutoff, a member of our team will happily reopen the issue manually and continue pursuing it.
No Carrier is available for any GitHub project, not just Bootstrap. If you have a project on GitHub that might benefit from this automation, we invite you to try out No Carrier. For more details, usage instructions, and feedback, check out the No Carrier project on GitHub. You can download the assembly JAR from the “Downloads” section of the v1.0.0 release page.
Bootstrap 3.3.5 is here! This release has focused on bug fixes, accessibility improvements, and documentation updates. We’ve had over 330 commits and 160 closed issues and pull requests from over 40 contributors since our last release! Hell yeah.
Since we last shipped a release, we made an official Slack for folks to hang out with other Bootstrappers. Registration is completely open thanks to the Slackin open source project. We have two channels to start—general and help—and nearly 1,000 members to date!
Bootstrap 3.3.4 is here! This release has been focused on bug fixes and documentation improvements. We’ve had over 325 commits from 29 contributors since our last release! Nice.
Here are some of the highlights:
Fixes for a few significant bugs in the Modal plugin.
Fixes for a couple annoying bugs in the ScrollSpy plugin.
Convenience aliases have been added for currency symbol Glyphicons based on their related 3-letter ISO currency codes. For example, .glyphicon-rub is a new alias for .glyphicon-ruble, the currency symbol for the Russian ruble (RUB).
We have deployed AnchorJS in our documentation to make it easier to link to specific sections within the docs.
Since our previous release was v3.3.2, you’re probably wondering why this release isn’t v3.3.3 instead. Basically, the official Sass port of Bootstrap had a Sass-specific bug in their v3.3.2 release, so they immediately issued a follow-up release to fix the bug. This bugfix release was initially numbered as v3.3.2+1. However, this 4-digit version number scheme has caused grief with some tools, so with the blessing of the Core Team, the Sass Team took this opportunity to switch to a more vanilla 3-digit SemVer numbering scheme. Thus, bootstrap-sass v3.3.2+1 was re-released as bootstrap-sass v3.3.3, with only the version number changed compared to v3.3.2+1.
To avoid confusion regarding which bootstrap-sass release(s) correspond to which upstream Bootstrap release, Bootstrap’s version numbering will henceforth skip over any bootstrap-sass patch release version numbers. Thus, the patch digit (i.e. the 3rd digit) of bootstrap-sass’s version number may be ahead of Bootstrap’s due to Sass-specific fixes, and the next Bootstrap release’s number will always be greater than the previous bootstrap-sass release’s number.
Download Bootstrap
Download the latest release—source code, compiled assets, and documentation—as a ZIP file directly from GitHub:
Bootstrap 3.3.2 is here! This release has been all about bug fixes, accessibility improvements, and documentation updates. We’ve had over 300 commits from 19 contributors since our last release. Woohoo!
Here are some of the highlights:
Updated Glyphicons to v1.9.
Reverted support for delegating multiple tooltips via a single element, because it caused nasty regressions.
Fixed a regression that broke wrap: false for the carousel plugin.
Added manual vendor prefixing back to carousel CSS to avoid a regression among folks not yet using Autoprefixer.
Improved accessibility of our examples and added more accessibility guidance to our docs.
We’ve also deployed two new bots to aid Bootstrap’s development:
Savage, a bot to automatically run Sauce cross-browser tests on JavaScript pull requests.
@twbs-grunt, a bot to automatically keep our compiled /dist/ files up-to-date
We’re stoked to welcome Patrick to the Bootstrap team! Patrick brings with him terrific accessibility expertise and has already contributed many improvements to Bootstrap’s components and documentation.
Download Bootstrap
Download the latest release—source code, compiled assets, and documentation—as a zip file directly from GitHub:
Say hello to Bootstrap 3.3.1. As one of our fastest follow up releases, the changelog is focused around a small set of bug fixes for our CSS and JS, loads of accessibility improvements, and several documentation improvements.
Bootstrap 3.3.0 is here! This release has been all about bug fixes, accessibility improvements, and documentation updates. We’ve had over 700 commits from 28 contributors since our last release. Woohoo!
Here are some of the highlights:
Added a handful of new Less variables for easier customization.
Removed recent progress bar changes for low percentages.
Removed all instances of translate3d as they improved repaint performance, but also added several cross browser bugs.
Added transforms to improve carousel performance in modern browsers.
Updated Normalize.css and our H5BP print styles to their latest releases.
Improved accessibility for navs, panels, tooltips, buttons, and more.
Resolved dozens of JavaScript and documentation bugs.
An update for the Bootstrap CDN will be available shortly.
New tools
Since our last release, we’ve open sourced two new tools:
Bootlint, a custom linter for all your Bootstrap projects.
Rorschach, a bot for checking new pull requests for common mistakes.
They join LMVTFY, our bot for quickly validating HTML in live examples. As the project, team, and community continue to grow, look for even more awesome tools to be open sourced.
Onward to Bootstrap 4
Perhaps the best part of releasing v3.3.0 today is that we can start to tell you more about Bootstrap 4! While the first alpha is a couple weeks off, here’s a quick preview of what’s to come:
Updated grid system with at least one additional tier for handheld devices.
A brand new component to replace panels, thumbnails, and wells.
A completely new, simpler navbar.
Switch all pixel values over to rems and ems for easier and better type and component sizing.
Dropped support for IE8.
Tons of form updates, including custom form controls.
New component animations and transitions for several components.
UMD support throughout our JavaScript plugins.
Improved JavaScript positioning for tooltips, popovers, and dropdowns.
Brand new documentation (written in Markdown, too!).
A new approach to configuring global theming options.
And hundreds more changes across the board.
We’d love to tell you more, but the dust still has to settle before we open our first pull request with a live alpha release. In addition to launching in v4 in the coming months, we’ll be maintaining v3 with small bugfixes for the first few months after the new version ships.
Bootstrap receives tons of awesome pull requests every week. Many of them come from folks new to contributing to the project. As such, there are a few beginner mistakes we’ve noticed over time.
So, we made Rorschach, a bot that runs a few quick checks on every new pull request.
Rorschach automatically gives instant feedback on Bootstrap pull requests that suffer from one of several simple mistakes, thus decreasing turnaround time on fixing the pull request. The bot refers the contributor to new documentation we’ve written to explain each of the mistakes in detail, along with how to correct them, thus decreasing friction for contributors.
Previously, these mistakes were checked for manually, which meant there was often a delay before the mistake was noticed and that pull request reviewers had to manually explain the mistake to the contributor each time. With Rorschach, everyone should have a smoother experience working on Bootstrap.
After hanging out on the Bootstrap issue tracker for a long time, you start to notice some common mistakes folks make (besides just plain invalid HTML). Many of them are covered in our documentation, but our docs can be lengthy and some of the mistakes are pretty subtle or have non-obvious causes.
Pointing out the same mistakes repeatedly gets tiring, so once again, we decided to try automating things. The result of our efforts is Bootlint, an HTML linting tool for projects using vanilla Bootstrap. Using Bootlint (either in-browser or from the command line via Node.js), you can automatically check your Bootstrapped webpages for many common Bootstrap usage mistakes.
We encourage you to add Bootlint to your web development toolchain so that none of the common mistakes slow down your project’s development. In the future, we hope to also make a GitHub issues bot based on Bootlint to help folks out on the Bootstrap issue tracker.
@mdo
November 24, 2015
