Replace Bootstrap with Bourbon Neat in OpenMRS ID

Projects ID Dashboard
1

I would like to propose 2 things for OpenMRS ID:

  1. Move from Less to Sass (easy to do)
  2. We use Bourbon Neat, which is a grid system which uses Bourbon Sass-mixins from the lovely people at thoughtbot. I am proposing this because CSS is where you should specify grid information, not in your markup (like Bootstrap does)

This would happen after we merge in the GCI changes.

1 Like
2

Personally …

  1. I’m in favor of sass to bring more alignment with the OpenMRS code base.

  2. However, Bootstrap is extremely more popular and familiar to potential contributors than Bourbon Neat. I would be very wary of abandoning such a popular framework, even if the alternative is somewhat more efficient. We want to maximize the number of people who can easily contribute to our software :smile:

1 Like
3

Understood – Neat does have a certain learning curve – it’s all sass-mixins that do the grid definitions.

4

I’m sure people here would be interested in learning more about it. Maybe you can make a small demo app with it and write up some description about it, to teach others and get them excited about it? :smile:

2 Likes
5

Perhaps I will – I might do my Ember experiment using it…

6

I’ve used both before. I think Bootstrap is a good fit for the ID Dashboard because it simply does more—has more UI components, layout options, etc. It’s something more people know and are used to. In my experience, Bourbon Neat is better at specifying visual styling of a page and Bootstrap is better at specifying a page’s components.

I chose to use LESS because that’s what Bootstrap itself is wriiten in, plus the LESS compiler is written in node and so we don’t need ruby dependencies in the ID Dashboard project.

I guess what I’m wondering is what would you really accomplish by this transition, aside from switching to your preferred tools?

2 Likes
7

Again, I wasn’t going to do it if I got a lot of resistance.

Actually there’s node-sass.

Our SCSS (sass is nice but SCSS means valid CSS also works) would be a lil slimmer…if we used bourbon…it gives things for free…sure we’d lose a lil…I’m perfectly fine with sticking with Bootstrap…

8

I hadn’t seen node-sass before, thanks! And sorry if my reply came off a bit heavy-handed.

I went ahead and created a ticket to consider migrating to SASS so that it can sit on the back-burner until the next time someone’s doing refactoring of the Dashboard UI. It would probably be fairly easy to transition from, but until we have a good opportunity to let’s stick with LESS

1 Like
9

not to worry…you’re fine.

I would like to actually work on that…they have less to sass converters and I can also easily switch to coffeescript (js2coffee)