Twitter Bootstrap

The Mountain Resource Group approached Kalamuna with a broken and hacked Drupal 5 website in desperate need of repair. After assessing the site, we decided to rebuild it in Drupal 7. Within two weeks and without a design budget, we used Kalatheme + Wrapbootstrap to make a great looking, responsive website.

In two short weeks, we went from this:

To this:

For immediate release
April 1, 2014
kalamuna.com

Kalamuna unveils bold, unparalleled new design

After years of internal re-branding exercises, Kalamuna has finally come to a consensus of how best to visually express itself to potential clients and employees.

“We wanted something really modern and sophisticated, yet wanted to shy away from the bland, stale presentation of everyone else out there. That’s why we went this direction,” said co-founder Mike Pirog.

As Drupal continues to become more complex and hyperspecialization produces significant gains in efficiency we need to ask ourselves: are we leaving people behind?

While it's true remarkable technologies like Vagrant, SASS/COMPASS, Drush, et al. have enabled professional services companies and experienced freelancers to provide higher quality goods at lower prices, it's equally true that in doing so we've erected even more daunting barriers to the newcomers and novices that are Drupal's current lifeblood and, ultimately, its future.

This is a tale of empowerment. I promise. But first...

Am I the only one that is perpetually frustrated by the tradeoff between functionality and beauty that seems ubiquitous in the Drupal.org hellscape? Why is it that modules so often rife with visual promise and loud verbage end up being naught but vaporware? Why is it that the most powerful and useful tools lack any meaningful documentation and/or look like someone threw up all over themselves?

This weekend Kalamuna drove up to UC Davis for Drupal Camp Sacramento to take part in the Drupal community.  We ran into some old friends and made new ones, and had the opportunity to sit in on presentations from knowledgeable developers about what's new and improved, and tactics for making the development process more efficient.  The most fascinating session for us was Jen Lampton and Nathan Haug's presentation on a new theme layer for Drupal 8, which will simplify theming in Drupal.

Twitter Bootstrap is one of the newest buzzwords you may have heard flying around developer circles. The promise is appealing: a standardized library of CSS (by way of LESS) styles and jQuery scripts that bring clean Web 2.0 aesthetics, responsive design, and a bunch of UX enhancing components in an easy-to-use bundle. However, how do we use Bootstrap with Drupal? Below we'll explore several themes and potential pathways to utilize Twitter Bootstrap in your next Drupal site.