Themestrap

Themestrap is a simple starter kit for constructing Twitter Bootstrap 3+ themes. It provides the skeleton for a simple, maintainable theme that always uses code directly from Bootstrap with as little replacement as possible.

Themestrap's Philosophy

1. A theme should be built on top of the framework, with as little intrusive change as possible.
2. As the framework evolves, a theme should be easily updated to the latest version.

To this end, Themestrap provides you with two simple files to modify: variables.less and theme.less (both in the less directory). You can tweak any and all of the Bootstrap variables in variables.less and support any additional code or classes you'd like in theme.less. The compiled theme CSS includes the Bootstrap library and will automatically pick up any overrides from variables.

Creating a Theme with Themestrap

To create a theme, first start by cloning the Themestrap repository into a directory named for your theme. We recommend a bootstrap-theme-THEME_NAME naming scheme:

git clone https://github.com/divshot/themestrap.git bootstrap-theme-THEME_NAME

Next, you should open bower.json and change the package name from bootstrap-theme-themestrap to match what you want your theme to be named. Now you're ready to install dependencies using Grunt and Bower (you must have these installed).

npm install
bower install

Now you're ready to go! Simply edit less/variables.less and less/theme.less to your liking. When you're ready, just run grunt and it will compile and minify the distribution for you. You can also run grunt watch to automatically compile as you work.

Testing Out Your Theme

We've provided a "Bootstrap Kitchen Sink" HTML file at examples/kitchen-sink.html that contains all of the various components in all of their variations. It may not be 100% exhaustive but it should give you a good idea of what your theme will look like at a glance.

You can start a development server at http://localhost:8000 by running grunt serve. Your theme will automatically compile while the server is running.

Deeper Customization

In cases where you need to do a more in-depth overhaul of a portion of Bootstrap's LESS, you may do so by simply copying over a file from Bootstrap's less directory into your theme's less directory and then modifying it as necessary. Example:

cp bower_components/bootstrap/less/alerts.less less/alerts.less

Because it takes path priority over the Bower-installed Bootstrap LESS, it will automatically override the Bootstrap default. In fact, this is how variables.less works already...delete it and the default Bootstrap variables will be back in play.

Releasing Your Theme

Before you release your theme, you should do a few things:

1. Make sure that you've updated the package name in bower.json and filled out your name, the theme name and GitHub repo info
2. Check the index.html file – it is generated using the information you supplied in bower.json. To change it to suit your needs, edit the template /pages/index.html.
3. Update the README.md file to be about your theme

Once you've done that, you should push it up to GitHub. The repository is already designed to be released directly onto GitHub Pages without an additional intermediary, so if you push to the gh-pages branch you should have a nice way to show off your theme!

Also consider registering a Bower package. If you do, remove the "private": true property from bower.json.

The Themestrap Gallery

We've created a gallery of themes built with Themestrap. If you have created a theme and want to add it to the gallery, just make a pull request to the gh-pages branch of this repository.

Copyright and license

Copyright 2013 Divshot, Inc. under the Apache 2.0 license.