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Front-End Web Development: Zurb Foundation or Bootstrap: which is easier to work with for highly customised designs?

  • I'm on the hunt for a new responsive framework for future projects.  The projects are all highly customised designs.  Previously we used a combination of H5BP + 960GS + JQuery UI and developed using Compass/SASS, which enable us to produce highly customised designs easily. From what I've been reading (e.g. this http://www.supadupawebdesign.co.uk/blog/Web-Development-3/Twitter-Bootstrap-vs-Zurb-Foundation-53), the suggestion is that Foundation is to implement unique designs, whereas some have commented on having to 'fight' Bootstrap to customise the design (i.e. having to override defaults).  How true is this? There are a few factors are making me lean toward Foundation such as it seems to be more Compass/SASS friendly, which fits in with our workflow (I'm aware of Compass/SASS plugins for Bootstrap eg. https://github.com/thomas-mcdonald/bootstrap-sass/), however it is hard to ignore the sheer popularity of Bootstrap, the excellent documentation and IE7 support. Is Bootstrap really that hard to customise in comparison with Foundation?  Am I better sticking with something that is more lightweight (e.g. http://getskeleton.com) or more of a grid framework (e.g. http://susy.oddbird.net/ or http://cssgrid.net) or will the benefits of a full featured framework like Foundation or Bootstrap outweigh the disadvantages?

  • Answer:

    I'm obviously coming at this question from a particular viewpoint but the intent of Foundation was always for it to be, well, a foundation on which you can build whatever you'd like. We don't rigidly enforce styles, and in fact each successive release of Foundation has made it easier and easier to customize. If you want to rapidly prototype or build something that you intend to fully customize I would say that Foundation is probably your best bet - Bootstrap is more of a style guide, it enforces a lot of (admittedly, nice looking) styles. Now, whether something like Susy is best for you is really up to you. I've not started any project without the benefits of a framework (in my case obviously Foundation) in a long time and I loathe the idea of reinventing the wheel when it comes to buttons. If you're used to Sass/Compass then Foundation will very easily let you remove any components you're not interested in using. Hope that helps.

Jonathan Smiley at Quora Visit the source

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Test your options for yourself,  if you don't play around with it how could you know, and with tools like jsfiddle, codepen and jsbin out there you could have had an answer before quora had one for you. Try doing something really difficult with both options, if you can't then try and find community answers, and evaluate how easy it was to implement and reuse. By doing this I decided that bootstrap was the framework I would be working with, it came natural to me, easy to remember patterns, yes a bit div crazy but then that's why macros in your text editor exist, although zurb models are by far superior and sexier than bootstraps, and at the time I was looking mainly at modal options, I found the bootstrap community to be much more active and there are much more generic reusable examples and functionality for bootstrap everywhere, again I love zurb out of the box, smooth, easy on the eye, but time is always a factor, and being able to get reliable answers when you can't get the answer on your own to me is really important, that there is code examples out there that is easy to change and implement to work with your project is a must have, and again bootstrap won.  It says nothing about the framework, I know how bad ass zurb is, but the strap is everywhere that matters when doing work that pays the bills. But you know, sometimes when nobody's looking i clone a local zurb and go nuts.  Hope this helps.

Stephan Maree

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