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You're comparing Apples to Oranges here. Bootstrap is not a template, it's a framework for people who know what they're doing to quickly build fully customized but aesthetically pleasing websites with a lot of the pain removed from cross-browser CSS.

It is similar to something like Blueprint (http://www.blueprintcss.org/), which I have used for my prototypes with a lot of success, but just taken much further.

discuss

tptacek|14 years ago

No, Blueprint (which I am a fan of, especially with Compass/Sass --- we shipped a product built on Blueprint) is a CSS grid that happens to have some nice typographic defaults.

Admin themes --- which, again, cost tens of dollars --- are uncannily similar to Twitter Bootstrap: they include full page layouts with dummy navs and a series of demo pages with styled markup for... well, more than is in Twitter Bootstrap! (They get to cheat and use jQuery). They are basically what you'd get if you gave a designer the brief "build the layout for my app, Lorem Ipsum 3.2 Pro".

You really ought to take a look at them. I know it's hard to take things from Themeforest too seriously. It was hard for me too. Now I feel dumb about that.

patio11|14 years ago

You really ought to take a look at them. I know it's hard to take things from Themeforest too seriously. It was hard for me too. Now I feel dumb about that.

To elaborate on what Thomas is saying: they revolutionized rapid application development at both our companies, for like $15 each.

In consulting projects I often have call to create little one-off internal tools in Rails, either as a prototype for a tool the client will create or to support their marketing team. These generally have development budgets measured in days, and I have the HTML/CSS skills of roadkilled turtles, so they came out totally unstyled. I'm now embarrassed by them: now when I start a Rails project I drop in one of my prepared admin theme layouts and blammo it magically looks professional.

Given that my clients end up paying thousands for those mini-projects, the level of polish is clearly worth it. It's like a Tiffany box versus delivering the ring in a small paper bag: if you think it doesn't matter, your mental model of human cognition is broken.

taylorbuley|14 years ago

Blueprint has always been very good to me.

Here the I think the pain "removed from cross-browser CSS" is removed here, at least in part, because this doesn't work across browsers (check the IE8 screenshot @paulirish posted)

dangrossman|14 years ago

I don't think that's true. Maybe you didn't see the reference to "admin themes". They're not normal website templates, they really are essentially the same as Bootstrap, collections of styles/images for menus, typography, forms, warnings/errors, tables and dialogs for use in applications.