Toolkit: A Front-End Framework for the Modern Web

Honestly, thanks for reading the article. I appreciate it.

I do agree that this article is a self promotion type of article, but I wouldn’t label it shameless. I shouldn’t be ashamed of my work, or this article, as I’m simple talking about it, not forcing anyone to use it. Just my two cents.

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I definitely agree with where you’re coming from, but if you ever want to try something new, why not Toolkit! Thanks for the support!

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Supporting you is easy. The article is well written and engaging. :wink:

I’m curious though… What do you feel that it would be Toolkit’s hardest competitor? Do you think about what others do when you upgrade it? Or is Toolkit more a vision of how to build a website?

Sorry if I’m asking too much. :smiley:

I do have a small project coming up so I will think about using it although I don’t know if it will be possible at all because it involves shopify and these type of sites have their own templates so I’m not sure how to ingretate it

I’m the editor for the HTML/CSS content and I can tell you right now that we don’t have enough of this type of “self promotion”. I would love it if more framework, library, plugin, and tool authors would write honest, down-to-earth articles on their experience building their projects and how those projects can help developers. When the tool is open source, it’s hardly “shameless”. In fact, we pay for these articles just like any others.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we only want promo articles. We aren’t going to publish too many like this, but I don’t think we do enough of these. Anything to help new tools get noticed is more than fine by me.

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I fully agree with you. The article is very well-written and it all makes sense. I didn’t think this was going to spark this kind of response, but I can’t say I don’t like it. I think it’s great.

No problem, don’t worry about it. And just to be clear: I kind of took your comment to be somewhat half-joking anyhow, so I don’t think it’s a big deal. You did say “nice” so to me you were saying “good job, self promoting is shameless, but that’s ok”… Maybe @RyanReese was a little overly sensitive on this one. :wink:

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The bottom line is that it’s an interesting article and a cool piece of work. Win, win!

For others who’d love to showcase their work, the forums have a Showcase category for this very purpose. :slight_smile:

First off, to call this “shameless self-promotion” is disingenuous. Besides, when someone has put this much effort to something - in their free time, no less - they’re quite entitled to shout about it!

As for the framework itself. I’ll be honest, my first thought was predictable - “another front-end framework?!?”. But then I looked at it in more detail, and I like a lot of what I see.

I’d like to make some comments and observations in list-form, if I may?

  • I’m not all that keen on some of it visually, but that’s a moot point - since it’s so customisable. I love that the styles are primarily structural, which should make it much easier to style and make unique.

  • Having said that, the demo site might benefit from having alternative “themes” to look at; partly because really good-looking examples will “grab” people, partly because it demonstrates the flexibility.

  • My biggest bug-bear about a lot of JQuery plugins and the like is that they force very specific markup structure on you. Things like carousels in particular. If Toolkit provides more flexibility, that’s a great plus-point in my book.

  • The JS being class/component based is great.

  • In fact, modern approaches all round. I particularly like the fact that it uses CSS3 animations where possible.

  • From a personal point-of-view, being RequireJS-friendly is a big plus point. No shims for Backbone work, which is great!

  • Again personal preference, but being SASS-based rather than Less is alright by me!

  • Personal preference once again, but I’d have preferred Grunt to Gulp - but you can’t please everyone!

  • Lastly, if there’s one thing I think might really help the accompanying website, it’s trying to cram as many of the components and styles onto a single page as possible, to make it easier to see what it offers at a glance; having a drop-down and forward/back arrows to browse through the framework is good for viewing components in isolation, but a “single page demo” would, I think, make it more accessible.

Overall though, really good work!

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@molona - I’d say that Bootstrap and Foundation are the biggest competitors, simply because the feature sets are very similar. However, I’d say that Toolkit’s unique features (JS classes, CSS namespaces, etc), is what will really set it apart.

When working on Toolkit, I take a lot of inspiration from fellow open source projects and developers. I’m constantly iterating and improving on the code base as technology moves so quickly.

@lukaswhite - I’m actually in the process of a new titon.io design that will be accompanied with a new, more advanced demo system. Right now, the demo is a bit sub-par, but it’s actually the testing suite I use for development, which can be seen here: https://github.com/titon/toolkit-tests

I appreciate all the feedback! I’ll definitely keep it in mind for 3.0.

Nice article…the framework by it selves looks really awesome although the website is just too crowded…hard to find your way around…I can see how it benefits developers searching for a certain functionality although if you see it for the first time…if it wasn’t because of your article I would just close it without giving it much thought…right now I am considering though using it for some smaller project :slight_smile:

Two things,

First I want to thank Sitepoint for publishing this article on Toolkit. I enjoy reading these types of articles.

Second I want to thank the author, milesj for making this framework available to us all and for an outstanding job of writing the article. I fully intend to give this framework workout once a current project is completed. I like what I’ve read and am eager to try out the framework.

Thanks

Steve

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I always say that , “if you spot it, you got it!”

I am very happy to hear about this framework, especially with the customizable integration of the BEM methodology. I’ve been missing this framework for years. @milesj Thank you!

It’s always nice to wake up to an article about a new framework that embraces modularity. I dearly want to try it out in two projects of mine (a WordPress theme and a Ruby on Rails site).

One thing that I do find a bit limiting is the drop downs. It’s a dicey problem I’ve found (as a newbie to front-end development) and I want to support click menus in both desktop and mobile. Not having access to nested menus on mobile feels both good and bad; good, because the typical kind of experience is not great on a small screen, but also bad, because I feel there ought to be a way.

Thank you for including ARIA support by the way. I like a web that’s accessible, and frameworks that support it are great… but I’ll have to test how good it is in Toolkit when I have more time. :slight_smile: At some point I would love to write an article about the accessibility of Bootstrap versus Foundation, and adding Toolkit to the mix is something I look forwards to.

I mentioned Titon Toolkit back in January as one to watch!
http://www.ustesg.com/2015/01/21/top-3-css-frameworks-to-watch-in-2015

Actually, I invited Miles to write on sitepoint about Titon. As someone who cares deeply about frontend frameworks, code bloat and having to follow someone else’s frontend standards, I felt that there is a lot to learn from what he has to say, irrespective of whether you intend to use Titon or not. Not many people maintain an open source software project for that long.

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Very interesting.

I am especially excited with the “decoupling” aspect and I think it could be a new direction for frontend frameworks with better flexibility to offer.

Definitely one to keep an eye for. Thanks!

This is pretty exciting! As I read the article, I was looking for one thing. I have to admit, I have been flabbergasted by the lack of knowledge and interest in accessibility more than ten years into the 21st century. Then I saw it “ARIA support”. Kudos to Miles for this!

Hi thanks for your Toolkit. It looks good. I like the decoupled JS, HTML and CSS. I also like the fact that using it would me an end to the styling wrestling match that goes on with foundation and bootstrap. And flexbox. Buono.

Thumbs up. I’ll try it out.

Looks interesting. Will give it a whirl, but i’m satisfied with Bootstrap at the moment.