How to add wrapbootstrap (made with twitter bootstrap) themes to rails application

Question

The website https://wrapbootstrap.com/ has themes which were made using Twitter Bootstrap. Each of these themes include different versions of Twitter Bootstrap along with other various libraries and versions (jquery, fontawesome, etc...)

How do I add these themes to my existing Rails app? What are the steps?

I'm especially curious about the conflicts that may arrise if I'm already using a different version of jquery, twitter bootstrap, fontawesome, and others (as declared in the Gemfile).

Thank you

Answer 1

You can add the css from the theme you purchased from wrapbootstrap to your assets > application.css.scss file. And use the html tags that came with the theme in your rails app views so that the css styling is applied.

Also, I would recommend using gem 'sass-rails' to import the standard bootstrap styling.

Here's a tutorial to get you started with adding bootstrap to a rails app. Adding the theme css and html tags is up to you.

http://railscasts.com/episodes/328-twitter-bootstrap-basics?view=asciicast

Answer 2

I did this for few of the projects, I agree with majorly what Mike has answered above. Here are some of the gotchas I saw.

We started as a standard project on Rails all our views dynamic(Ember)/static were based on Bootstrap CSS. When major internal pages were up and functionality demonstrated we focused on landing pages. By this time we had the gems for bootstrap, fontawesome added to our Gemfile.

So one of the thing is to remove these gems "bootstrap", "fontawesome" from Gemfile. Include these as part of your wrapbootstrap dump.

Also as you progress with integration you may realize that a lot of common code is being repeated, its in your best interest to split the page components: headers, footers other things as partial Rails views. It severely saves the editing effort.

Another thing I found extremely useful to keep every thing up while you are still in integration stage, is to split your CSS/JS includes for pages imported from wrap bootstrap and pages you already have. So if you intend to migrate all existing pages into new theme scraping your CSS, then it can be merged in stages, otherwise you can let them co-exist.

You have to add new entries in routes.rb, controller calls to support the pages if you don't have them already. Likes of about, contactus, team etc. etc.

And if you use something like Ember/Backbone then you have to manage the co-existence of single pager app in some pages which may or may not be linked to the Wrapbootstrap pages.

This was all the things I had to take care off when I integrated the wrapbootstrap theme on top of Rails-EmberJS app.

Answer 3

Interesting timing as I just had to do this myself. I'm still fairly new to Rails so this might not be the best solution, but here's how I got it working ...

Note: every theme is different so this may not be a one size fits all approach.

1) My theme was built with Middleman and it was expecting to run stand alone or on a Sinatra instance.

2) In order to get the theme up on Rails, I had to add the compass gem, the sass gem, the sass-rails gem, and the compass-rails gem to work properly. I'm assuming you can install these (if required for your theme).

3) Assuming you have a Rails app ready to roll, go into your assets directory and backup your .js, .css, and all fonts and images. Place your theme asset files in the appropriate place.

4) Now do the same with your view layer. You may have a partials and/or pages folder which you can place in the views directory. You'll want to put application.erb.html and any navigation files in the layouts folder under the views directory. Again, make sure you back up your original files first.

5) If your theme was designed for Sinatra, you may have a Config.rb file. I moved the logic from this file into my config/environment.rb file. I was the least confident with this step. Other Rails devs can chime in if there is a better location.

6) Start your server up. You may encounter some exceptions but this is to be expected.

7) Take a look at your old app/assets/javascripts/application.js file and compare it to the new file. Ensure that the new file has the jquery ujs library included //= require jquery_ujs . Without this bit of magic your PUT and DELETE HTTP verbs won't work properly.

8) Path adjustments. My theme had the Font Awesome library included. In order to get it to work, I had to adjust the reference paths at the top of the font-awesome.scss file.

9) Finally, you'll need to debug the newly added code in the environment.rb file. The Sinatra developer was doing a lot of Route magic to adjust the navigation display. This wasn't porting over well to my environment. I removed many of these calls from my navigation template files. Once complete, my newly skinned app was up and running! Good luck.