The next mountain to climb

Why is it so hard to use Bootstrap and WordPress together? This is the next big hill to climb: I want to use Bootstrap in our Plugin UI and have it work with ALL themes…

This week I slammed together a quick Business Intelligence tool for monitoring inspections at Long Term Care homes in Ontario. COVID-19 and a peripheral association with the industry made this a priority.

Bootstrap 4 and Datatables and WordPress

It was when I tried to convert the Admin UI into a shortcode for anonymous users that I discovered that the theme I was using was incompatible. I haven’t figured out how to make it compatible but that’s my new mission.

A quick hack was to switch themes to a Bootstrap 4 theme for WordPress, but building plugins for wide adoption means it’s not cool to ask the admin to switch themes. It’s my opinion that a good WordPress plugin should work in all themes. Your shortcodes must work on all sites. It’s not negotiable.

I haven’t figured out the secret to this just yet, but I suspect that it’s going to be ugly. Something like prefixing the Bootstrap class names and building a UI library to emit the incantations that avoid the conflict. Stay tuned…


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