Blueprint CSS Framework Readme

Welcome to Blueprint! This is a CSS framework designed to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your own CSS on. Here are some of the features BP provides out-of-the-box:

• An easily customizable grid
• Sensible default typography
• A typographic baseline
• Perfected browser CSS reset
• A stylesheet for printing
• Powerful scripts for customization
• Absolutely no bloat!

Project Info

• Web: http://blueprintcss.org
• Source: http://github.com/joshuaclayton/blueprint-css
• Wiki: http://github.com/joshuaclayton/blueprint-css/wikis/home
• Bug/Feature Tracking: http://blueprintcss.lighthouseapp.com

Setup Instructions

Here’s how you set up Blueprint on your site.

1. Upload the “blueprint” folder in this folder to your server, and place it in whatever folder you’d like. A good choice would be your CSS folder.
2. Add the following three lines to every <head/> of your site. Make sure the three href paths are correct (here, BP is in my CSS folder):

   
   <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/blueprint/screen.css" type="text/css" media="screen, projection">
   <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/blueprint/print.css" type="text/css" media="print">
   <!--[if lt IE 8]>
     <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/blueprint/ie.css" type="text/css" media="screen, projection">
   <![endif]-->

   
   Remember to include trailing slashes (" />") in these lines if you’re using XHTML.
3. For development, add the .showgrid class to any container or column to see the underlying grid. Check out the plugins directory for more advanced functionality.

When you want to run the ruby scripts yourself, you’ll need to run these to install the required gems on yours system:

1. ensure you’ve got rubygems installed, e.g. by running (as admin/root) apt-get install rubygems
2. ensure you’ve got rake installed, e.g. by running apt-get install rake or gem install rake
3. make sure you’ve got qmake and the QT4 libraries (and developemnt headers!) on your system (those are required by capybara-webkit, which is a dependency itself)
4. gem install bundler
5. bundle install

Tutorials

• How to customize BP with the compressor script
• How to use a grid in a layout
• How to use a baseline in your typography

Files in Blueprint

The framework has a few files you should check out. Every file in the src directory contains lots of (hopefully) clarifying comments.

Compressed files (these go in the HTML):

• blueprint/screen.css
• blueprint/print.css
• blueprint/ie.css

Source files:

• blueprint/src/reset.css
  This file resets CSS values that browsers tend to set for you.
• blueprint/src/grid.css
  This file sets up the grid (it’s true). It has a lot of classes you apply to <div/> elements to set up any sort of column-based grid.
• blueprint/lib/blueprint/grid.css.erb
  This file is used by the compressor (see below) when generating grids. All changes to grid.css are mirrored in this file, manually.
• blueprint/src/typography.css
  This file sets some default typography. It also has a few methods for some really fancy stuff to do with your text.
• blueprint/src/forms.css
  Includes some minimal styling of forms.
• blueprint/src/print.css
  This file sets some default print rules, so that printed versions of your site looks better than they usually would. It should be included on every page.
• blueprint/src/ie.css
  Includes every hack for our beloved IE6 and 7.

Scripts:

• lib/compress.rb
  A Ruby script for compressing and customizing your CSS. Set a custom namespace, column count, widths, output paths, multiple projects, and semantic class names. See commenting in compress.rb or run $ruby compress.rb -h for more information.
• lib/validate.rb
  Validates the Blueprint core files with the W3C CSS validator.

Other:

• blueprint/plugins/
  Contains additional functionality in the form of simple plugins for Blueprint. See individual readme files in the directory of each plugin for further instructions.
• tests/
  Contains html files which tests most aspects of Blueprint. Open tests/index.html for further instructions.

Extra Information

• For credits and origins, see AUTHORS.
• For license instructions, see LICENSE.
• For the latest updates, see CHANGELOG.