As you upgrade through the 10.0 series in the coming days/weeks, you may notice that there are a ton of small template changes and you may wonder what these are for. These changes are part of ongoing efforts to merge as much of the default theme and the bootstrap theme as possible without changing the appearance of either.

The reason: bootstrap needs to be a first class citizen, so that you can feel secure building on it and easily apply your own custom bootstrap themes even if you start from the default theme. With bootstrap having dozens of customized templates like it has so far, maintenance is difficult and it ends up being buggier than the default theme because I occasionally forget to apply a change to bootstrap that I apply to the default theme. As I merge the templates, bootstrap will be able to directly add its style to default templates. Only a small number of bootstap templates will remain customized -- even though they'll all look just as customized as they do today, and the default theme won't start looking bootstrappy.

How is this possible? Basically, I'm including both the standard and the bootstrap css classes on each element. For extra elements bootstrap has which default lacks, I'm adding those into the default while leaving them unstyled so they're not visible in default. Table header rows on submit/edit pages are the most difficult since bootstrap's titles are above the table while default's are in the table's first row, but I've solved that by changing it to the bootstrap version while making it appear the same in default as if it were the table header row.

So far, so good. While I'm testing as I go, there's always the chance of this messing something up for someone, which is why I'm doing it in the new series and not the stable series (9.2 is now the stable series). In the long run, it's very good news if you're a web designer who wants to more easily take advantage of the many bootstrap themes out there.