ikiwiki/ tips/ bootstrap themes evaluation

There are now 4 or more ikiwiki bootstrap themes flying around in the theme market. It is quite confusing.

In order to figure out exactly which ones fares the best, i made test wikis for all of them. All the wikis have a sidebar with the sidebar plugin enable, so if you don't see it, it's because the theme doesn't support it.

- http://bootstrap-jak.wiki.orangeseeds.org/ demos the jak-linux.org original bootstrap 2 theme, now updated to 3.3.4. note that this theme needs the bootmenu plugin to generate a menu, and doesn't support the sidebar plugin
- http://bootstrap-ramseydsilva.wiki.orangeseeds.org demos the ramseydsilva bootstrap 3 theme
- http://bootstrap-hiatobr.wiki.orangeseeds.org demos the hiatobr fork of the above
- http://bootstrap-dequis.wiki.orangeseeds.org demos the dequis theme, another fork of the above
- http://bootstrap-tgpfeiffer.wiki.orangeseeds.org demos the tgpfeiffer rewrite
- http://bootstrap-anderbubble.wiki.orangeseeds.org/ demos the theme from anderbubble, another separate implementation

Hopefully this will help others figure out what the heck is going on here... Personnally, I think I prefer the JAK linux one, but i don't like the idea of depending on a theme-specific plugin... -- anarcat

Update: I ended up forking the Jak theme also... My experience has been documented in this blog post. --anarcat

Congratulations on your setup and here is my mea culpa on this:

Originally I've started making the hiatobr's fork to address the following issues with the other attempts to make a bootstrap theme:

- The sidebar wasn't working;
- The themes were poorly written and did not found a way to incorporate the bootstrap proposal to the ikiwiki's template model;
- I wanted diversity and the original idea was to provide a handful of templates like the bootstrap examples.

Turns out:

- I've fixed the sidebar, don't remember how but you may find out in the history;
- I've added an opengraph plugin in the template so your facebook friends can share your blog posts;
- We have translated stuff to Brazilian Portuguese totally ignoring the i18n conventions so that kind of broke the template;
- The "proper way" to use the template is not documented;
- We did not provide other templates as planned because of the end of Hacklab Independência;

The webdev collective has just met again and the plan to make multiple ikiwiki blog bootstrap templates will continue, but since I've failed once, this shall wait for results.

As for the theme market page, since the modifications didn't provide much innovation, mine included, I've edited the page, see if it seems cleaner now.

--desci

There you go, I've provided a minimalistic Bootstrap 3 Template that should behave the proper way (tm) and it's easy as cloning the repository on `/usr/share/ikiwiki/themes/boostrap` and setting `theme: bootstrap`.

I've saved an example on the wayback machine, because I will continue to improve that theme and the idea now is to make multiple variations of it, so the user has a choice. For example, changing the navbar from black to white requires some bootstrap specific changes, so I'll probably make another theme just for that.

--desci