This is exactly why Bootstrap is so useful. As it's so well used and known there's generally a solution out there for any weird problem you might have, and any developer can pick it up and be productive immediately.

Yes it's big, and to get the most from it you have to design for it from the start, rather than make it fit whatever the design is.

For a large web project I'm leading, we're using Bootstrap 4 with our own styling, but at every step from information architecture through to front-end we're using default components and variables wherever possible. It definitely makes things faster, more convenient and maintainable.

It's like using a well-known content management framework like Drupal instead of a home-brewed CMS built in Racket* or something. Drupal is boring, heavy and overkill for smaller websites, but it solves common problems for big websites really well, has a huge library of contributed code and is well understood by lots of people. The Racket site would probably be more fun, faster and cheaper, but a nightmare to maintain three years later when all the original team members have left.

* Not knocking Racket, I love Racket. Just picked it as an example of something more obscure than Drupal.

It's good to get more confirmation that Bootstrap is the way to go. Just today a cohort from Startup School sent a link to a screencast where he had built his entire admin in Bootstrap, and it looked like it saved him a ton of time.

That being said, I built a CMS with a key idea that the site editing/configuring should be under the control of the designer. (as much as reasonable) And anything that couldn't be should be as easy as possible to understand. (down the road exporting the entire site to static files will be an option as well)

I think we all have limits on what control we want to give up but it's easy to set aside when there's a large community support around a framework. I picked up Vue and I am dumping my custom framework that it replaces. And made a new micro-framework to replace jQuery functionality not easily found in vanilla js.

(isn't Racket a programming language?)

Is it hard to design on top of/customize Bootstrap 4? A colleague of mine knows version 3, and is concerned about diving into 4 because community support isn't robust around it yet. (ie, low number of answers on Stackoverflow for 4)

We’re transitioning a 20 year old website with over a billion annual page views over to a fully bootstrap 4 front-end. The site is a grab bag of technologies and frameworks from across the ages, so it’s not a simple task.

We’ve approached it using component based ‘atomic’ design principles, using Bootstrap’s defaults wherever possible. The company is rebranding next year so the styles need to be really easy to change.

As for v4 vs v3, there’s a few changes in syntax and the under-the-hood move to Flexbox, but as far as I’m aware the front-end team haven’t run into any showstoppers.

Once the transition is complete the plan is to compile our own version of Bootstrap with only the js and css we need.

(Yes, Racket’s a language. I was thinking of a nifty static site generator I saw written in it the other day. I’d love to build a site with it but under no circumstances would hand it over to a client.)