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From ‘Ugly’ To ‘Nice’: Migrating to bootScore

/ by Karsten Reincke | Leave a comment

From ugly duckling to beautiful swan

That I would have to give up YAML-CSS had quick­ly become clear to me at the begin­ning of the year. What I should replace it with, not. I want­ed to stay with Word­Press. And to recy­cle my old con­tent. So, all I had to do was to replace my old theme. The­o­ret­i­cal­ly. Even­tu­al­ly, I end­ed up migrat­ing to bootScore:

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In the begin­ning, I found a lot of alter­na­tive themes, often com­mer­cial, often with­out ref­er­ence to the CSS/JS (open source) soft­ware used. But for me, it should be FOSS after all — e.g. bootScore, a tru­ly open frame­work.

bootScore deliv­ers the miss­ing link between boot­strap and your Word­Press based site: a Boot­strap based theme. The theme itself is open­ly devel­oped in a bootScore GitHub repos­i­to­ry, is dis­trib­uted under the terms of the MIT license, can be ‘pimped’ by spe­cif­ic bootScore Word­Press plu­g­ins, and offers step-by-step doc­u­men­ta­tion. It claims to be 100% GPDR ready and offers com­plete WooCom­merce sup­port in its WooCom­merce ori­ent­ed child theme. To cut the long sto­ry short: Who­ev­er wants to con­vert his site to boot­strap should give bootScore a chance for sav­ing work and time.

But there is also a down­side:

  • bootScore explic­it­ly says, that “all set­tings can only be made by using the .scss, .php and .js files”. That implies that you have to devel­op your own child theme if you want to mod­i­fy the behav­ior and the design of your bootScore-based site. bootScore has pre­pared a respec­tive child-theme tem­plate and the instal­la­tion guide let you ‘auto­mat­i­cal­ly’ cre­ate such a child theme.
  • bootScore strict­ly fol­lows the phi­los­o­phy of boot­strap, which has been devel­oped by Twit­ter. Thus, both fol­low the prin­ci­ple of mobile-first: the design is first devel­oped for gad­gets with small screens and lat­er on trans­ferred to desk­top com­put­ers. So, the pow­er of the ‘weak­est’ device deter­mines the behav­ior of the ‘strongest’.

So, both — bootScore and boot­strap — have a rea­son­able phi­los­o­phy. We don’t have to like them, but we should respect them: Both do work that — if they did­n’t exist — we would have to do our­selves. But they require us to cus­tomize our instance on the code lev­el.

Nev­er­the­less, I will prob­a­bly become — with a deep bow — a lit­tle heretic. Some­times I just want more. Start­ing from a pure bootScore theme — I want to cre­ate a fan­cy site that makes even my wife smile. I want to keep the good­ness of bootScore and Boot­strap with­out sac­ri­fic­ing any­thing spe­cial.

And I even­tu­al­ly want to be able to remem­ber over some small posts how I will have imple­ment­ed it. I want to col­lect the descrip­tive snip­pets so that they can be of use to oth­ers last.

And we start here with the pure bootScore theme applied to the old con­tents of fodina.de. If you want, you can com­pare this via the Way­Back­Ma­chine for the old ‘fodina.de’

And how does this …

… sup­port our migra­tion to bootScore? Well, if a web design­er must aban­don her cur­rent Word­Press theme, she needs a replace­ment. A free ‘off-the-shelf’ theme, she prob­a­bly wants to per­son­al­ize. First a bit cos­met­i­cal­ly, then in terms of the gray val­ue of her pages, mul­ti­lin­gual­ism and inter­nal ref­er­ence tech­niques and link­ing. Final­ly, she per­haps enables spe­cial foot­ers, a sec­ondary menu or a copy­right notice before check­ing the SEO fea­tures of the select­ed theme. This is a way that this post sup­ports too.

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