This last week we’ve added two new developer tools to the Bootstrap tool chain and I wanted to take a minute to let you know a little bit more about what they are, why we’ve added them, and why it matters.
JSHint is an awesome community-driven linting tool, used to detect errors and potential problems in your JS, and to enforce coding conventions. It’s super flexible and can easily adapt to whichever coding guidelines and environment you expect your code to execute in.
As of 2.0.3, all JS (including tests) will be run through JSHint as a part of the build process.
We’re hoping that this will both catch potentially unsafe syntax as well as encourage a convention around Bootstap’s JavaScript style.
To begin with, Bootstrap’s JS will use the following options (stored in a .jshintrc file in the js dir):
We hope this will make it a little easier for those looking to contribute to Bootstrap, and lessen the pain around pull requests with divergent styles. If you haven’t played with JSHint, you should definitely take a moment to check it out right now!
Recess is a project developed at Twitter to help support our internal style guide.
At it’s core, Recess is a linter, but with the added ability to compile and/or reformat your css/less files: normalizing whitespace, stripping 0 values, reordering properties, and any other safe stylistic optimizations it can find.
What this means is that instead of just telling you where you have problems, you can actually tell Recess to just go ahead and tidy your code up for you.
To begin with, we’re only using Recess in this manner — as a compiler for our Less (rather than the lessc compiler directly). This gives us strict control over the output of Bootstrap and let’s Mark and I really geekout, which we’re super excited about (we like things to be perfect… we’re nerds like that).
Eventually we’d like to try to roll these tools (along with our unit tests) into some sort of continuous integration service. At Twitter, we’re already using travis-ci on a number of our other projects (Hogan.js, Recess), so we may follow suit with Bootstrap soon. This will make it even easier for us to accept pull requests from the community, as we’ll be able to see all our tests passing! :)
Anyways — that’s all for now. As always, if you have any questions or feedback, let us know! thanks!
Our next release, 2.0.3, is almost ready to rock, but we need your help to get the finish line in the best shape possible. Similar to what we did for the big 2.0 launch, we’re asking for the community’s help in testing out the release’s work-in-progress branch. We have a ton of bug fixes—another 80 or so since 2.0.2—and want to have the highest quality release we can.
Why?
Good question. 2.0.2 introduced some bad bugs in component behavior, publicized outdated documentation, and introduced some ugly regressions. That sucks, and when those things happen, we get held up tracking them down because we missed something in our haste to get a release out the door. We want to focus all our efforts on the 2.1 release after 2.0.3, and to do that we need to get as bug free as we can with this one.
We’ll leave 2.0.3-wip open for widespread testing all this week (April 16-20) and then push a release while Jacob and I are in London on April 24. That should give folks, including us, enough time to test the waters and report any back on any issues.
How?
Just like last time, we’re pushing out a release candidate of the 2.0.3 code and docs. Here’s how you can help us out:
Head to GitHub and checkout the 2.0.3-wip branch.
Don’t want to check out any code? [We’re hosting the latest version of the docs here (http://203rc1.getbootstrap.com) so you can easily load it up on devices and such for testing.
Load up the new docs in your favorite, or your least favorite, browser or device and start testing.
When you find a bug or have feedback, open a new issue on GitHub. Please include as much context and information as possible. If it’s a visual bug, please include a screenshot. If it pertains to JavaScript, consider including a jsfiddle or jsbin.
If it’s a code fix you can make yourself, go ahead and submit a pull request against 2.0.3-wip. Be sure to read the Contributing to Bootstrap wiki page first though for a bit of insight into our code practices. (Unsure how to submit a pull request? Learn more here.)
We’re only human, and we’re bound to make a few mistakes in our code as Bootstrap continues to grow. Thanks in advance for all your help and support—it’s appreciated more than you know.
As you may have heard, Jacob and I are heading to London in a week to talk Bootstrap—and we’re pretty stoked about it! The event is already sold out, but we’ll be there for a few days to be sure to chat and hang with folks in the area.
As part of our visit and talk, we’ll be releasing Bootstrap 2.0.3 on April 24 from London, our first intercontinental release. It’s been a long time coming, and we know lots of you have been anxiously awaiting its arrival, but we want to do this release the best we can. In addition to the release itself, the rest of our talk will focus on the future of Bootstrap. We’re not exactly sure what that will be yet, but the 2.1 milestone on GitHub might give away some of it.
Stay tuned for more info and feel free to hit us up on Twitter for questions, opportunities to meet up, and more.
Earlier today Bootstrap passed 25,000 watchers on GitHub. For the last few months it has been the most watched project and continues to grow at an alarming rate. In fact, I recall writing about 8,700 watchers back in October. Jacob and I are still both in awe of how this former internal pet project has grown into one of the most popular front-end frameworks on the Web.
We’ve still got a lot ahead of us for features, refinement, and more, but we wanted to take a moment once again to thank the community for making Bootstrap the success that it is today.
Thank you. Really, thank you.
And a special thanks to the 119 contributors (not including Jacob or myself) who have committed code to Bootstrap. Without you guys, a lot of this wouldn’t be possible.
Welcome one and all to the new, official Twitter Bootstrap blog. From now on, Jacob and I will be posting info on new releases, documentation changes, great examples of folks using Bootstrap, and more. Stay tuned for our first post on the next two updates for the project.
