Web development toolkit Bootstrap is getting ready to part ways with Twitter. The open source project began life at Twitter, but with its two primary developers leaving Twitter for other companies, Bootstrap will be spun off on its own.
Bootstrap co-creators Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton are both leaving Twitter and have announced that Bootstrap will continue but as "its own open source organization." For now nothing is changing; Bootstrap will remain a Twitter project on GitHub. But eventually the pair plan to give Bootstrap a life of its own.
The Bootstrap project is designed to help you get your website up and running as fast as possible. Somewhere between a framework and a "theme," Bootstrap offers an HTML, CSS and JavaScript base for your designs, including built-in forms, buttons, tables, grids and navigation elements. Among Bootstrap’s more impressive tricks is the grid layout tool with support for advanced features like nested and offset columns. Bootstrap is also impressively lightweight, weighing in a just 10kb (gzipped).
Bootstrap 2.0, released earlier this year, added some much-needed responsive design tools for creating fluid layouts, including a new flexible 12-column grid system.
The move away from Twitter should be good news for Bootstrap users, particularly with Twitter's increasingly hostile attitude toward developers. Otto assures anyone worried that Bootstrap will become abandonware that both he and Thornton are dedicated to Bootstrap. "The project has grown beyond us and the Twitter brand," writes Otto on the Bootstrap blog. "It's a huge project playing a pretty awesome role in the web development industry, and we're excited to see it continue to grow."
To see some real-world examples of what you can do with Bootstrap, head on over to the unofficial showcase, Built with Bootstrap on Tumblr.
