Open HTML files or import them

One feature, or let us say, option that I consider missing and a major flaw is the fact that I can’t directly open or import an HTML file to the project (design).

I’m a computer consultant and I have a huge amount of templates, mockups and so on (all of them using bootstrap of course), and I find that if I want to recreate an HTML design in Bootstrap Studio I have to build it from the ground up. That’s not practical and if the original design is complex, totally unpractical.

I find Bootstrap Studio a very nice program, easy to use and learn, with some interesting features that help a lot while design a new page from the ground up but with this major flaw, which I found very important and would be quite interesting if you could incorporate. Some other features that I found that are missing, it’s already planned and considered on the road map.

Thank you for this and your other great suggestions in the forum, Luis!

Importing external HTML is a hard technical problem, as there are no limits to the HTML that you can write, but Bootstrap Studio expects pages to be constructed in a specific way. So to make this work we have two choices:

  1. Build an algorithm which takes your HTML, analyzes it and constructs a correct layout out of the Bootstrap Studio components. This will be very hard to do and will break if you don't use Bootstrap perfectly. And to be honest very few people do.
  2. Take the entire page's HTML and place it into the upcoming Custom Code component. This is much easier and will always work, but you won't have drag/drop inside the custom code block, and components won't be detected and displayed in the Overview on the left.

We can add option 2 together with support for Custom Code components as soon as this week. It is still better than nothing and you will still be able to use Bootstrap Studio’s CSS and JS editing.

Do you think you’ll personally be satisfied with this?

Thanks Martin!

Yes I understand your point of view and I think we should give a try at your suggestion and see how much that helps. We’ll elaborate a little more afterwards. Thanks.

Stumbled upon this idea while hoping and investigating a way in which I could just use the contents of an externally linked file in my Custom Code block. Here's my issue, I'm working on a help page of sorts, and I've built the structure all in BS. The main "content" block of the help site is a Custom Code block... which works great. However, we have other members on the team that will often make changes to that core content (in the current site). What I'd like is to say, point the Custom Code block to an external file to get its contents, so that when I export the BS project, it gets the latest and greatest content that may have changed externally, and of course when I export the project it will grab the live contents of that external file. I don't want to have to make sure I copy and paste from an external file to the Custom Code block every time I export the project. So, it sounds like I'm wanting something between choice 1 and choice 2. I want to bring in an external file, but I don't need BS to analyze it in any way. Basically, Custom Code blocks aren't analyzed anyway, right? Any ideas on making something like this work? Thanks!

EDIT: Maybe after playing around a bit more with the Custom Code block... I see what you're saying about Choice #1 now... guess you can't just "go crazy" in the html. But still, if you're doing #2, then you're still potentially copying/pasting "crazy" code... so why not just point to an external file and grab that code anyway? Dunno.. maybe a pipe dream for me at the moment.

Just waisted $25 this product is too basic, there are equivalent products around and are FREE!. I would discourage anyone from buying this software.