Catch up with the latest news from Miva.
"The goal in creating the framework was to provide our development community a foundational framework to build responsive websites for their clients," said Brennan Heyde, VP of Developer Relations at Miva Merchant. "This framework will help our developer community build better websites, faster than ever before."
When building the framework, developers looked into everything that was currently on the market for existing responsive frameworks, including Bootstrap, Foundation, and building one from scratch. Each framework had its strengths and weaknesses, but in the end, Miva Merchant developers chose to build a Miva responsive framework on Bootstrap 3.0.
"Bootstrap has a large developer base that already know and love Bootstrap and have built sites using its framework," commented Heyde. "We wanted to leverage that developer knowledge and make it as easy as possible for an existing Miva Developer and someone who is completely new to our platform to build a Miva Merchant store."
Bootstrap has a large amount of built-in components that can be used to build different parts of a website, including: Dropdown Menus, Navigation bars, Alerts and Sliders. A full list of these features can be found here: http://getbootstrap.com/components/. These components standardize different features across each website, in order to make the building process more comprehensive.
The Bootstrap framework was designed to be installed when building a new store on the Miva platform from scratch. It requires CSSUI, which is already a standard foundation when building a store on the Miva Merchant platform. While, it can be used on a production site out of the box by adding a logo and some styling, Miva Merchant's vision for the framework goes much further.
"We hope developers use this as a starting point and implement their own custom designs on top of it," Heyde said. "We're excited to see what creative uses the Miva Developer community comes up with."
The new Bootstrap Framework is the first in a series of developer tools and frameworks that Miva Merchant will be releasing over the next coming months. The Miva Merchant Bootstrap Framework is completely free and can be downloaded here: http://www.mivamerchant.com/bootstrap-framework.