WordPress and other CMS’ like it have taught us well that not every site needs to be dynamic. In fact, it can be hell on the server. So, just about every decent coder out there has taken a stab at making a static site generator. This is a good thing. If they keep this up, we may one day have one that’s user-friendly. For now, they are decidedly developer-centric, and somewhat experimental. At this stage, they are fascinating. Today’s offering is the appropriately named Middleman, and it’s built...
This is part of the underappreciated series, where we explore CSS frameworks that are well-made and have great ideas, but never took off like the "big two". For a full introduction, see the first article in the series. Kickstart is a bit different, and a bit more ambitious, than some of the other frameworks featured in this series so far. It aimed to take on Bootstrap and Foundation directly. And, though it didn’t quite reach that status, it comes with some great ideas. The implementation’s great...
Many, many frameworks have been created since Bootstrap took off. It may not have been the first, but it sure made people start thinking about them. People made them for the experience, for the fun of it, and to solve very specific needs. They made them for clients, for themselves; alone, and in teams. Some were sub-par, some were only usable in specific cases, and others were brilliant. But very few got any serious recognition from the community. Eventually, you’d see a new framework or five every other...
Pretty much the moment Google released their Material design guidelines, people started working on frameworks for it. However, the earliest examples were all dedicated to apps and app development. It took a while for someone to develop a Material-based framework for websites. Enter Material Design Lite (or MDL), a simple Material-based CSS framework for the whole family. Now anyone can easily bring most common (and recognizable) aspects of Material Design to any website. And now we have a question:...
Colour Garden, the brainchild of front-end web developer Tom Hare, from Cambridge, England, has released Avalanche, a CSS grid system that’s responsive, SASS-based, extremely clean and powerful. Sounds too good to be true? We look at it in more depth. For a grid system to be well-received, it must have many benefits, and Avalanche promises plenty. They include: A flexible naming convention ... Your width class names now come with three naming conventions: fraction (1/4), percentage (25) and...
Buzzfeed just released a CSS framework, and you’ll never believe... okay, I’ll just stop myself there for everyone’s sake. The point is that yes, the Internet publishing giant has indeed released a CSS framework called Solid. Is it any good? Yeah, basically. It’s good for them, at least. Installation ... Accomplished via NPM, and only NPM, for now. ’Nuff said. Style ... The thing to remember about Buzzfeed’s framework is that it was made by Buzzfeed, for Buzzfeed. All of the style-based...
Bootstrap is beloved by many. Well, if not “beloved”, then it is at least appreciated for what it is: a giant framework with almost everything you could need for building a site or web app interface. Bootstrap is changing, though. That’s right, version four is in alpha release. Naturally, we're just as curious to know what’s different, so I dived into the documentation to find out. Keep in mind, though, that this is an alpha release. It cannot be considered feature-complete. It could radically...
Swift, Apple’s programming language targeted towards OS X and iOS developers, has just been released as open source. Under the Apache License, all of the source code—which covers code for a unique package manager—is going to be open to edit and compile. This means that programs can be created without any attribution. In a press release on the Apple site, the company announced that developers from all over the world can contribute to new Swift optimizations and features, thereby bringing Swift...