What’s new
There are no breaking changes since our last beta, but we have made some key improvements and resolved some tricky bugs.-
Print styles and utility classes have been updated. We’ve
improved how printed pages are rendered to ensure pages are reasonably
sized instead of rendering them as mobile devices. Print display
utilities also include a whole slew of new
displayvalues to match our standard display utilities.
-
Additive border utilities have been added (e.g.,
.border-top) and default to a solid 1px light gray border. Now it’s easier to quickly add all borders or a subset of borders to your components.
-
Our
$spacersand$sizesSass maps have been updated to allow more customization the same way our color maps work. You can now add, remove, or replace all your key-value pairs consistently across our CSS. Head to our Theming docs for more information and examples.
-
Added documentation to our Theming docs for using our provided CSS variables for those are living on the edge and don’t want to use Sass.
-
Added responsive
.order-0and.order-lastclasses for more control over the flexbox grid.
Documenting our approach
New with v4 stable is a brief overview of some of the guiding principles behind why we do the things we do in Bootstrap. Our intent is to distill and document all the things we keep in our heads while writing code, building linters, and debugging. Much of this is focused on concepts and strategies for writing responsive CSS, using simple selectors, and limiting how much JavaScript one needs to write.Check out the new Approach page, and be sure to open an issue or pull request with feedback and suggestions on what else to cover.
New examples
Nearly every example has been overhauled for our stable v4 release. We’ve removed a couple outdated examples, added brand new ones, and really overhauled a few others.
Here’s the rundown of changes to each:
-
You’ve likely already seen our Album example, but it’s been updated for this release to include more content in our photo cards and improved mobile rendering.
-
Pricing
is brand new with this release and is a fully custom page built with
our utilities and card components. It’s responsive and easily extended.
-
Checkout is a brand new, extensive form example featuring all the best parts of our form layouts, validation styles, grid, and more.
-
Product
is also new and is a cheeky riff on Apple-style marketing pages,
largely built with only our utility classes. Don’t take it too
seriously!
-
Blog
has been rewritten from the ground up. Gone is the two column blue
header layout. We’ve built a snarky magazine-style layout with featured
posts and responsive navigation.
-
Dashboard has been overhauled as well to feature a live ChartJS example, includes a refreshed sidebar with Feather icons, and is semi-responsive.
-
Floating labels
is brand new and builds on our sign-in example to provide a CSS-only
implementation of the floating input label. This one’s experimental and
may see major changes before we bring it to Bootstrap proper.
-
Finally, Offcanvas
has been rewritten from the ground up to show off a navbar-built
drawer, horizontal scrolling navigation, and some custom lists built on media component and utilities.
Known issues
No release fixes every bug, and the same can be said for our v4 stable release. Here’s some of the things that we’re looking to tackle first in either a minor release (v4.1) or a patch release (v4.0.1) as time and scope allow.-
Input groups, validation, and rounded corners.
I rewrote this for Beta 3 and I thought nailed it, but I was mistaken.
We have some rounded corner issues and the only way we can fix them with
CSS without breaking backward compatibility is by limiting how
extensible the component can be made. We may need a modifier class to
avoid some gnarly CSS and satisfy all the key functionality. Check out
the issue and cross-linked PR for more details.
-
Table variants, in particular
.table-active, have a weird selector we’ve unintentionally left linger since prior releases. The bug results in double application of anrgba()background color—once for the<tr>and once for any<td>/<th>elements within.
Next releases
Speaking of releases, we’re excited about the momentum we have going for us. Our GitHub project boards are mostly up to date on upcoming releases, so feel free to jump in and take a look. Our next release will be v4.1 (pending any bugfix patches) and will focus on a slew of small new features, utilities, responsive font sizes, and more. From there we have a couple more minor releases that rally around another group of features.We aim to make RTL part of an upcoming minor release depending on overall scope. It’s taken us far too long to commit to this, but we’re on it. Our current plan is focused on implementing this into our build tools and components so you conditionally serve, for example,
bootstrap.min.css or bootstrap-rtl.min.css.
Weigh in on the open issue please with any feedback; when we’re ready,
we’ll tee up a fresh pull request with help from the community.It’s worth reiterating that each minor release will bring a new hosted version of our documentation. Right now, we have
getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/ and come v4.1’s release, we’ll have that plus getbootstrap.com/docs/4.1/. Prior releases will continue to be linked from our navigation as is already the case for v3.x and the last v4 alpha.Themes update
Bootstrap Themes are getting a major update this year! We’ve been absolutely thrilled with the response since we originally launched Bootstrap Themes and we’re finally ready to share our plans for what’s next.For the past few months, we’ve been working with some amazing theme creators to bring their awesome work to the Official Bootstrap Themes store. We couldn’t be more excited to announce we’re expanding Bootstrap Themes to include ten brand new themes. We’re currently targeting a first quarter launch with themes all built on Bootstrap 4 (sorry, no v3 for these). Depending on final reviews, we might even get them to y’all in the coming weeks.
So much of Bootstrap’s reach and usefulness comes directly from designers, developers, and creators all over the world building businesses with and on top of Bootstrap. We want to use our platform to give these creators an even larger audience and provide y’all with the best Bootstrap team-approved themes.
Stay tuned for more information as we get ready to launch.
