I'm finding it hard to automatically combine the BStudio exported HTML file with my PHP Web framework, which wants to generate one file each of HTML, JS, and CSS and inserts content like meta keywords and descriptions and dynamic order forms. In other words, how to build a real website based on the output generated by BStudio automatically using a programming language (like PHP). Any hints for this, anyone?
Or is it better just to use Bootstrap instead of BStudio, and generate each page component using my PHP framework directly?
Firstly you need to realize that HTML JS and CSS "are" a real website. PHP is basically only used for things like CMS's or the need for databases and such these days. It's not necessary to use PHP for websites unless you need it for external items. If that's the case, you'll need to use an export script for it. Try a search on the forums here and see what there is for "Export Script", it's been talked about quite a bit, but I don't use any so I'm not sure how they are set up.
Thank you! This is really helpful. The Help information, (including for Windows), is at https://bootstrapstudio.io/tutorials/export-scripts . The option itself is at Menu > Settings > Export > Advanced: enter the Export Script path and click Save.
My websites do a lot more than can be done with the output of BStudio. I could write a whole article about advanced things that PHP-built websites can do, and ways they can make the job of creator and maintainer easier, both for development and production websites. A tiny example: I offer clients a large and dynamically-configured application form, which I plan to generate using an easy to write JSON array of objects. BStudio certainly can't do this. In fact, I'm toying with generating the entire site this way, using BStudio just to create simple example Bootstrap component code for each needed component.
Yeah I can see how PHP would help there. I don't program that, but I do use external components like forms via Machform.com which are pretty powerful so there are resources for things like that for people that don't do the programming. Hopefully that info will get you what you need then, and others may chime in here with more info as well.
Many developers come here and buy BSS hoping to incorporate it into their particular, unique workflows. Unfortunately, most of us who frequent the forums aren't using exotic combinations of software, frameworks and other languages to create our websites. We're basically building static Bootstrap websites for specific application. It seems like every few days someone pops up asking how they can incorporate "such and such" with Bootstrap Studio to achieve their goals. Few of us have answers for them. We're mostly just good at answering questions specifically related to the use of BSS and building websites with it.
Thank you for helping to reset my expectations. Please don't worry about me; I'm simply exploring BStudio along with many other technologies to find what will work best for me. I have a feeling for the kind of website I'm trying to create, and all the answers I'm getting here are helping me quite a bit!
If you are looking to just build "code blocks" on export I would look into Python Beautiful Soup HTML parser. It can do pretty much anything to a html page such as removing everything you do not want and saving just the code section you want. For instance I use a class such as "dynamic" for the parser to search for when it opens the file and saves just that section. The sky is the limit with what you can do. I can change all the extensions from html to php and also change any link extensions in the html page to php. I also have linked the code section in the main pages to subpages I store as templates which the code blocks are exported. Any update to the html main page gets the template section updated such as styles and additions.
I could probably do this by using Bootstrap itself but since Bootstrap Studio already has so many features that make it easy to program in Bootstrap I really do not need to reinvent the wheel.
Here’s an example of how I extend the functionality Bootstrap Studio to build a Wordpress site in PHP.
Bootstrap Studio for the front-end stuff, such as page templates, CSS, JS. This is exported to a folder
Pinegrow Theme Converter: I point Pinegrow at the exported folder, and can now attach Wordpress functions to HTML elements. For example, I would select an element on of the pages I created, and in Pinegrow, I’d set that to “display post featured image”. You only need to do this once as it’s a page template. Once you do an export in Pinegrow, all the files are renamed from .html to .php and it will generate a theme for you, complete with all the styles and scripts you need to enqueue in functions.php.