Show HN: Find a Bootstrap theme for your next project

by bharani_m • 12 years ago

78 25 12 years ago

bharani_m7• 12 years ago

I've been working with Bootstrap for a couple of months now and I have noticed that it is pretty difficult to filter through all the free and premium templates available for Bootstrap. You usually have to wade through fancy cover images and screenshots.

I have created Bootstrap Carnival to make theme discovery a bit easier. It instantly shows you the demos of over 1000+ premium Bootstrap themes from multiple marketplaces (WrapBootstrap, Creative Market and Themeforest).

Let me know what you think about it.

ryanmim• 12 years ago

I like it, quite useful to be able to quickly preview the themes without having to wade through the description pages.

One thing that would make it much better (at least for me) would be the ability to filter by marketplace. Creative Market is by far my favorite because of their license terms (much better than Themeforest or WrapBootstrap).

bharani_m7• 12 years ago

Thanks. Glad that you like it.

Creative Market is by far my favorite because of their license terms

Yes, I love how easy it is to set up a shop with Creative Market. I hate the exclusive product/author terms in ThemeForest and WrapBootstrap.

You can search for "Creative Market" to find themes from that marketplace.

27182818284• 12 years ago

I was just looking for a Bootstrap template, so you hit my little pain point at exactly the right time. I'll spend some more serious review time on it in a bit, but at a glance I was a little overwhelmed by the looks. It isn't too bloated with features, but for some reason the layout made my brain think it was at a glance. Again, I'll play more thoroughly later.

bharani_m7• 12 years ago

Drop me a line at bharani[at]bootstrapcarnival.com with your feedback once your review it. Would love to hear your thoughts.

rootuid• 12 years ago

this is an advert, wtf!

jgillich• 12 years ago

It's advertisement for the maker, just like news about the new thing that Apple/Google/Microsoft/... made. But that’s usually ok.

bdcravens• 12 years ago

Many "Show HN"s are, and that's okay. It's a thing the OP made, which is relevant to HN, which happens to have commercial applicability. It's not like spamming affiliate links.

amrit_b• 12 years ago

Good stuff! I had something similar in mind, but you already made it. Thanks!

general_failure• 12 years ago

http://bootstrapcarnival.com/search?q= shows empty :)

is there a way to search for free themes?

looks awesome!

bharani_m7• 12 years ago

http://bootstrapcarnival.com/search?q= shows empty :)

Ah. Thanks for pointing it out. Will fix it.

is there a way to search for free themes?

I've added a few free templates and I'll be adding more soon. The only problem is that free templates are all over the place. I need to manually sort through them to find the right demo/download links and to avoid duplication. I'll add a specific tab for free themes once there are around 10 free themes.

johnchristopher• 12 years ago

That could suck up a lot of your time. Are you planning to semi-automate the process by letting people submit themes ?

wffurr• 12 years ago

Visited with an iPad. Everything got tiny, and then Chrome crashed.

bharani_m7• 12 years ago

Thanks for the heads up. I'll fix the bug shortly.

wyck2• 12 years ago

No offence since this is not directly related to bootstrap, but the default example theme is a good example of a style that seems to be gaining popularity and is completely garbage.

Websites (generally) are meant to be read and optimized for digesting data in a meaningful way, they are not an exercise in animation and moving everything into a confusing mess of eyeball soup.

Web designers, would you build a doorway on a house that constantly moves...?

Please stop building web sites where everything animates into place, it's a horrible trend.

andrewliebchen2• 12 years ago

You realize a website is fundamentally different than the front door of a house?

wyck2• 12 years ago

That's a silly thing to say, really.

I will elaborate on my point in case you missed it, form should follow function, this principle applies to architecture just as much as a website.

The case with the current trend of animating everything into place reminds me of "Ornament and Crime" which is another architectural idea that can be equally applied to a website.

To be blunt, it simply means stop animating/decorating shit into place for effect, it is meaningless and a disservice to real design.

Bahamut• 12 years ago

The sidebar takes up too much space on a mobile view - it would be worthwhile to rethink how to display the information for mobile browsers.

jqm• 12 years ago

Nice site. Will use.

One tip... am on Firefox 20 using Linux.

I arrowed through a few themes, but after checking a demo am having trouble backing out into the main menu. It keeps sending me back into the same demo when I "back button" out.

grimtrigger• 12 years ago

Nice!

jonathanleane• 12 years ago

Sorry to hijack, but I literally just launched something very similar:

http://www.themebeacon.com/

I even posted about it to HN the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7888745) but it seemed to vanish in about 30 seconds...

Now that I've got that shameless plug out of the way...

I really like the way you have executed on this - particularly the way you show each theme's description while you load the demo page in the background. Are you just pulling themes from ThemeForest at the moment? And may I ask how you're seeding your database? Are you grabbing RSS feeds, or have you built scrapers to go out and grab data from the various description pages?

EDIT: PS, can't get your blog link to work for some reason? I'm in Chrome...

bharani_m7• 12 years ago

Sorry to hijack, but I literally just launched something very similar:

ThemeBeacon looks really cool. Love the landing page design.

I really like the way you have executed on this - particularly the way you show each theme's description while you load the demo page in the background. Are you just pulling themes from ThemeForest at the moment? And may I ask how you're seeding your database? Are you grabbing RSS feeds, or have you built scrapers to go out and grab data from the various description pages?

I've written scrappers that run as background processes every night to fetch data from all the marketplaces (Themeforest, WrapBootstrap and Creative Market).

piratebroadcast• 12 years ago

I want to kick you in the fucking nuts for autoloading the demo and not giving me the option to read about it first. You have text there but then you cover it up. Have a separate "Launch Demo" button, seriously.

Show HN: Find a Bootstrap theme for your next project

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