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Boot Frames

Boot Frames is a wireframing framework that uses Twig and Bootstrap to provide a way for web developers to quickly wireframe and prototype websites.

Why does this exist?

I am a back-end developer who uses PHP every day to build websites. I will occasionally find myself needing to wireframe something to explain a concept to clients/designers/project managers/etc, or, in some cases, wireframe an entire section of a site to get a better grasp on a concept myself. Being a backend developer I found myself balking at tools like "My Balsamiq" and "Moqups" (which are great tools for non-technical folks putting together wireframes) and longing to just be able to write some HTML and not repeat myself so much.

With the advent of some truly amazing templating languages and my own experience being in Drupal and Symfony I decided to create a simple framework that would allow me to put together some common elements for a website and quickly put together wireframes using HTML, CSS and Javascript, the result is Boot Frames.

Boot Frames uses Twig as it's templating engine and Bootstrap as it's base theme to enable developers to quickly build wireframes in a way that is comfortable and familiar (and most of the time a lot closer to what the end result will be). It also provides a set of common tools to make the wireframes easy to navigate and manipulate for project managers and clients.

Installation

Either clone this repository or download and unzip a release from the "releases" tab above. From the root directory run:

to install the dependencies for Boot Frames.

To run bootframes you need to make the web/ directory available in a web browser, which can be done in a number of ways on your local, but I'm not going into those in this documentation. Visit Boot Frames in the browser and you should be good to go.

Configuration

Boot Frames has two files in the config/ directory:

• config.yml: this file contains the global application configuration
• routes.yml: this files contains the manually configured routes (this is optional)

Creating wireframes

By default Boot Frames will scan the templates/ for wireframes and automatically create routes for any templates it finds (this can be overridden in the config.yml file).

To create a new wireframe just create a new template in the templates/ directory (or any sub-directory) and it will automatically appear on the wireframes list.

For help using Twig check out the excellent documentation on their website.

Boot Frame link helpers

Boot Frames comes with several Twig plugins to ease creating links between wireframes and linking to assets within the web/ directory.

url

Use {{ url('/absolute/url') }} in your templates to link to an absolute URL in the web directory, this will prefix the link with any subdirectories required for the link to function (and the functions below all pass through this function).

route

Use {{ route('/route/machine/name') }} (or {{ route('route_machine_name') }} if using the routes.yml file). To link to any route you have defined. If Boot Frames cannot locate the route it simply outputs a # so that you can create the wireframe later (if you are so inclined) and the link will automatically activate.

route_reverse

This functions the same as the route function, but instead allows you to input a path and get the same result (either an active link or a # if that path isn't defined for a route). This is more useful when using the routes.yml file.

Boot Frame authentication states

By default Boot Frames sets and maintains two GET parameters "authenticated" and "privileged", these are set as global twig variables so all templates have access to them and can modify behaviour accordingly, for example:

Navigating wireframes

Boot Frames comes with several helpers that allow users to clearly view all active links for a wireframe and view the same wireframe as "authenticated" and "privileged" users. Controls for toggling "authenticated" and "privileged" appear in the bottom left corner of the screen, along with a link back to the wireframe index.

Pressing q on any page will highlight all available links using bootstrap tooltips. By default the tooltip shows the href attribute of the link, but you can specify a title to override this.