Hi I'm just throwing this out there. Does Bootstrap Studio support AMP? If not, is it possible to have this support implemented? I hear Bootstrap is not a good framework to use for AMP! So just wondering if this is actually possible?
Sound of crickets :/
I think this tool should be transmuted into an amp authoring tool.
Thanks for the suggestion! Unfortunately amp is not compatible with Bootstrap - It is an entirely separate framework that comes with its own components and ways of doing things. It would be best to keep Bootstrap Studio focused on the Bootstrap framework.
is there an alternative like something we can import and (manually) specificy images that are hidden on load?
For example the images in lightbox, can they be loaded only when they are clicked on with a preview image loading only if they don’t click?
If you are talking about the Lightbox Gallery component in the Media section of the Studio panel, you will note in the Options tab (upper right) when you click on one of the Lightbox images there is an option called Lazy loading. This does what you are describing.
So the method would be as follows. You would make a small thumbnail image whose maximum size would be no larger than the largest dimension the gallery thumbnails display at. Then use that image as the source URL when you click on the Link in the Link Options.
Then, the actual full size image would be placed inside the link. Then you select the image in the Image Options, and set it to “lazy load.”
Now, on page load, your low-resolution thumbnails will load with the Lightbox gallery, and the larger images the thumbnails link to will load only when you click on the thumbnail.
Hi - I just discovered BSS and love it. Amazing job.
I know this thread started a while ago, but I am wondering what the general thoughts on AMP are in 2021.
Will it surpass BS at some point? Or will people find it too restrictive? Obviously the frameworks are different, but if AMP adoption exploded, and there was an option in the future to select BS or AMP depending on the job, it would be a dream to use your BS editor for AMP as well (or to buy a separate product eg. AMP Studio).
These guys have gone for the dual option system: https://mobirise.com/ They are pitching themselves to pure drag-and-droppers though, so I don’t know how it performs at the hands of a developer/designer, and their business model is different. I haven’t used it, just found it after researching AMP a bit more.
I know it’s a different framework and not on the roadmap, but AMP is a ‘competitor’ to Bootstrap. Any general industry thoughts would be appreciated from people close to this… Maybe AMP is not here for the long run, and the buzz will die. I personally don’t know enough about AMP. I just don’t like the idea of Google dictating yet another thing, and giving special SERP treatment to their own technology.
From what I’ve been reading, I wouldn’t want anything to do with it anyways. Sounds like they are not filtering phishing and scamming sites at all and you could have your listing show up right next to some scammer’s listing etc. And they also strip a lot of the framework out making very bland looking sites that are basically content only things. Doesn’t sound interesting at all, and also sounds very dangerous for those of us with legitimate sites.
It’s an atrocity that a company like Google can do whatever they want and control the internet as they have done in the past 5+ years since forcing us to use SSL on non-SSL necessary sites and the dreaded GDPR notices on sites that don’t even collect anything at all, or if they do it’s usually Google doing the collecting with their need for scripts to manage our accounts with them for Metrics. So controlling and they should be controlled better.
Mobirise is a toy compared to BSS, and while the program is technically “free”, they nickel & dime you for anything that would make it useful to a professional developer. For example…
BlockPack for AMP – $99
BlockPack for M4 – $99
Lazy Load (CSS optimization tool) – $39
PWA (progressive web application) Builder – $49
Popup Builder – $49
Form Builder – $59
WOW Slider – $49
PayPal Shopping Cart – $59
Icons – $49
Code Editor – $69
However, if you try to purchase one of these themes or add-ons, you’ll find that you can’t actually do that (at least not at the moment). Instead, after clicking the “Buy Now” button, you are redirected to the portion of the page that offers Mobirise’s all-in-one Website Builder Kit. This kit includes all the themes and feature extensions and goes for $99/year. This kit is listed as being 97% off. Mobirise arrives at this figure by adding up the cost of every single individual theme and extension, which would come to $4638. Obviously, nobody would ever pay anywhere near that much for a DIY website builder’s add-ons. What’s more, the 97% figure is misleading due to the fact that you’ll be paying $99 annually for the themes and add-ons, while the prices of the individual extras (which, again, you cannot currently buy individually) are listed as one-time charges.
Compare that to Bootstrap Studio which is a mere $60, one-time purchase for a fully-featured program that can build the most professional websites one could ask for using the latest Bootstrap technology, plus you get functional forms, free hosting and free updates for life. It gets frequent updates, the developers never charge anything extra, are highly responsive to the users and their ideas, and incorporate many of our suggestions into future versions. I’ve yet to see a better development team than Martin and his crew. The ONLY area BSS is lacking is in documentation, but the Forums are well supported, and most people get their problems solved here with little difficulty. But, BSS is not for people who don’t want to learn CSS, or the basic fundamentals of how websites work. It’s not a program for the pure drag-n-drop crowd.
Plus, Mobirise will endlessly market crap to you, send you emails and hammer you to buy their “latest new features.” The program It is geared towards the novice, “I don’t want to learn a single thing about how to build websites correctly” crowd, which is why they are still around. There is a market for such types, but I don’t think any serious web developer, freelancer or small business would rely on Mobirise to build websites for clients.
As for AMP… it’s days are numbered. Google created and promoted AMP because it benefits Google, not because it benefits website owners or developers. Stripping down a website of features or content to make it load faster is not the future of web design. Every year, bandwidth and throughput continue to increase exponentially. It’s only a matter of time (a few years) before affordable gigabit wireless will available everywhere on Earth thanks to new technologies being developed (like Starlink.) As it is now, most developed nations have full 4G wireless coverage, and virtually all major cities and suburbs have high speed internet from either cable or fiber-optic. It’s only very remote, rural areas that are still stuck on 3G or DSL, and these are already being addressed by Musk’s Starlink.
Every “band-aid” technology that has been invented to save space (storage) and increase speed has eventually ended up going defunct because progress in technology is always towards greater storage and speed, with smaller form-factors that require less power and cost less. Just look at how quickly we went from 3.25 floppies to Zip disks, to CDs, to DVDs, to USB thumb drives, and micro SD cards, and from mechanical hard drives to SSDs. In 5 years, AMP will be pointless and useless.
Eventually Bootstrap will be replaced as well, but then so will the whole process of humans coding websites via keyboards, mice and trackpads. Eventually, we’ll be in “Star Trek holodeck” land, and you’ll just describe what you want in plain language, and it will be created in seconds. In 20 years, the websites we’re building and using today will seem as primitive and antiquated as the monochrome 80 column ASCII graphics of computers from the 1970’s.
@jo-r and @printninja - thanks for your replies.
It is literally not possible for me to agree more with every single point you made.
BSS may be pound-for-pound the best software I ever bought.
Trust me, I noticed the issues with the Mobirise business plan. It is basically putting a price on complete unwillingness to learn a single thing.
I just like to ask for opinions, especially when I know I am not close enough to a particular topic.
The sickening part of it all is when Google says “jump” and everyone asks “how high?”. I understand the world will keep revolving regardless of what I do or don’t like, but it’s nice to know that I perceived the situation accurately. Nothing about AMP makes a lot of sense. It’s basically a ‘text only’ version or RSS page tied to Google-approved servers which undoubtedly track you
It’s just that the Google monopoly is capable of forcing such changes regardless, hence my original question (ie. “do we need to be prepared for this, or will it die like so many of their other projects? And if we need to deal with it, maybe BSS can assist?”).
The BSS developers (in my view, and at least when it come to the BSS program) are focused exclusively on making BSS the best piece of software it can be, with more features that make it easier for their clients to build the most modern, efficient and effective websites possible using the Bootstrap Framework. They truly care about this baby of theirs, and their client base. Very rare in today’s world.
They are not interested in other frameworks, nor do they seem interested in incorporating (at not least internally) the myriad of different javascript libraries, or other website-related technologies that new users are constantly suggesting. It seems like lately, every time someone buys BSS, the first thing they do is come to the forum and post something like, “It would be great if BSS considered incorporating XYZ (ex. Tailwind)” because that’s what they were using prior to buying BSS, or because it’s the latest thing buzzing around the website development community.
And people are continually posting requests in the forums for things like back-end features… CMS, PHP support, blogging, e-commerce, and full access to the HTML. The developers have responded, and explained numerous times how they are not adding back-end support to BSS, and how such changes would be impossible to do without completely abandoning the way the program allows you to build websites using drag-and-drop Bootstrap components to create the page’s HTML - which is both clean and semantic (something almost unheard of among the vast majority of website “builders.”) To my knowledge, the few builders I’ve seen that really get this aspect correct are Pinegrow and Webflow (can’t comment on Wappler because I’ve never looked at the code generated by a Wappler-built website.) But looking at the spaghetti (often proprietary) code produced by builders like Wix, or Weebly, or (gasp) Wordpress, just gives me an instant headache. Wix is a MASSIVE company worth billions, yet they produce some of the slowest-loading, worst-ranking websites out there.
The BSS developers seem to be very judicious when it comes to adding things internally to BSS, and in my experience they need to be in accordance with the official Bootstrap Framework, or things that have become firmly established, universal parts of website development (for example, Open Graph objects, sitemaps, Google Maps, etc…) Things that have proven they are here to stay, and are more or less essential, beneficial parts of any properly built website in 2021. And when they do add them, they are very careful to add them correctly, so that the websites BSS produces are quality products.
That’s all great to hear. Nothing worse than vacillating between builders, frameworks, formats, languages, etc, especially for people who just want to focus on getting the job done. Who has time to jump between them all and learn a new one every month and ruin workflow and render past projects deprecated across a tech-mess of a portfolio?
Regarding this:
It seems like lately, every time someone buys BSS, the first thing they do is come to the forum and post something like, “It would be great if BSS considered incorporating XYZ (ex. Tailwind)” because that’s what they were using prior to buying BSS, or because it’s the latest thing buzzing around the website development community.
I think that is understandable, given most of these people are looking for assurance that their decision to commit to framework/tool is the right one. They see how BSS works so well, and ask the question, to be sure they’re not ‘missing out’ or only ‘halfway’ there, given the laundry list of internet articles they’ve been reading to that point.