Page layout/construction

[robertandrews]

Thanks for Bootplate. I had been coding my own custom Bootstrap 4 alpha theme. Then I discovered Understrap but found that the SASS stuff was above my head. Bootplate looks interesting.

However, whilst it is clear that I can now author post and page content running the Bootplate theme, and you offer a number of page templates, I am still confused about one thing...

I am also interested in using Bootstrap 4 to construct the layouts of some of my pages, some of which may be static or dynamic content, and/or include post feeds or not. That is, I'd like to introduce some containers, cards, etc.

I don't really see any options on the market that offer i) Bootstrap 4 ii) wysiwyg/drag-and-drop iii) WordPress page or theme building. I have seen a few with names like:

• DopeWP BBE
• WordPress Bootstrap builder
• PB Sandwich
• Elementor

... But they don't really use Bootstrap, or at least Bootstrap4.

The bigger pseudo-wysiwyg builders like Divi, Visual Composer, Beaver Builder and the one by Thrive Themes, to be knowledge, use standard HTML mark-up, not Bootstrap 4 mark-up.

Non-WordPress Bootstrap builders like Brix and Bootstrapbuilder don't use support v4, or, WordPress theme building.

So, how would you recommend approaching this, let's say, with Bootplate?
Presuming, these are some options:

• Hard-code some theme files that use the mark-up I want.
• Use page templates.
• Use HTML in page content.

As a simple example, how did you get your alert and column divs on to your page at http://bootplate.jdmdigital.co/themes/ ? Was this by writing HTML in to the code view for your "themes" page, or something else?

Thanks, and apologies if this isn't an "issue".

[jdmdigital]

Let me unpack your questions further a little later. For now, a lot of the fancy columns, alerts, cards, and stuff like that are included in the free Bootplate Shortcodes plugin (details here: http://bootplate.jdmdigital.co/plugins/shortcodes/ and the GitHub repo is here: https://github.com/jdmdigital/bootplate-shortcodes ).

Most (all, really) of the CSS to power this stuff is already included in the core Bootplate theme. It's just a best practice to keep some of the fancy functionality in a plugin and out of the theme.

So, the theme doesn't use a page builder. We find those usually slow the page speed unnecessarily. So, we opted for using shortcodes within the editor for those times we needed a DIV row, col, etc.

There's a full list of all the plugins (Bootplate and others) used on the theme preview at: http://bootplate.jdmdigital.co/plugins/

Hope that helps. Apologies for the delay in response. More information coming soon.

[jdmdigital]

Since WordPress v5, we should consider merging some of that shortcode stuff into the new block editor.