Bootstrap turned four years old last month and with that, version 4 alpha was announced. Let’s take a gander at all that’s new.
Bootstrap’s moved from Less to Sass(Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets) as its source. As a result of this move, compile time for Bootstrap has reduced considerably. The grid system has been completely overhauled to afford greater flexibility on mobile devices. Flexbox grid support is finally here. You can easily switch boolean variables and take advantage of the new system and its components.
Say goodbye wells, thumbnails and panels; cards are better! With version 4, Bootstrap has introduced cards which do everything that well, thumbnails and panels did, except better.
No more IE8 support. Forget about using px in your CSS, it’s time to start using rem and em which are better for responsive typography and makes resizing components easier.
JS plugins overhauled. Each javascript plugin has been rewritten to suit ECMAScript6 standards which brings UMD support, option type checking and more features. Improved tooltips placement. Thanks to tether, which is a positioning engine, tooltips will now be auto-positioned in a more efficient manner.
Bootstrap 3 isn’t going to die soon.
Unlike what they did with Bootstrap 2.x when 3 was launched(they killed it), we will continue to see critical bug fixes being rolled out on a regular basis for Bootstrap 3 well after 4 has been released.
Official Bootstrap Themes
After having fiddled around with the idea of coming up with official themes ever since Bootstrap version one was announced, they’ve finally got around to launching an official store. There were three themes at the time of writing this and each costs a whopping $99. Check it out here: http://dgit.in/BootstrapThemes
