Flat Bootstrap is a modern, fully responsive, “flat” style theme with a nice color palette, big full-width images, and full-width colored sections.

It automatically adapts for desktops, tablets, and phones. It is based on the standard WordPress starter theme (_S) and the Twitter Bootstrap CSS framework. The theme was inspired by the HTML/CSS themes from Blacktie.co and color schemes from Designmodo.com’s flat UI.

Features include a mobile navigation bar, multiple columns (grid), buttons, icons, labels, badges, tabbed content areas, collapsible content areas, progress bars, alert boxes, carousels (sliders) and much, much more. This is a theme for both users and theme developers with lots of features but without the bloat.

Why We Wrote this Theme

There are thousands of WordPress themes and dozens of Bootstrap themes, but almost all of them are designed with a maximum width. Most of the Bootstrap themes are also only for developers, not users, with just the basic ugly Bootstrap sticking out like a sore thumb. Most of the Bootstraps themes aren’t based on a core WordPress theme either, so they can be difficult to figure out how to adjust the styling.

We developed this theme to be unique in these key ways:

  1. It is based on the WordPress core “starter theme”, so you already know how to style it and override templates and such in a child theme without learning anything new!
  2. It is based on Bootstrap for cross-browser capability in a fully responsive theme with tons of components that you can use in your content, such as buttons, navbars, sliders, etc.
  3. It is designed to be a modern, “flat” (or technically “almost flat”) theme with full-width colored sections and full-width images. This really brings your content alive and allows the reader to focus on that content instead of the theme itself.
  4. Its open source AND completely free. Most themes like this are considered “premium” themes and cost money. Our hope is that user’s will love it and theme developers will start using it as a core “framework” as well.

Theme Features

  • Fully responsive theme that changes layouts for desktop, tablets, and phones
  • Modern, “flat” style theme with beautiful color palette
  • Big full-width featured images on any page
  • Full-width colored sections
  • Hundreds of icons from Bootstrap and Font Awesome
  • Variable column footer with 1 to 4 columns

WordPress Features Supported

custom-background, custom-header, custom-menu, featured-image-header, featured-images, flexible-header, fluid-layout, full-width-template, left sidebar, light, one-column, responsive-layout, right sidebar, rtl-language-support, sticky-post, theme-options, threaded-comments, translation-ready

Page Templates

  • Full-width page with colored page header
  • Full-width page without page header
  • Full-width page with three (3) most recent posts (in columns on desktop)
  • Page with right sidebar (default)
  • Page with left sidebar
  • Page without sidebar
  • Site Index with search, pages, categories, tags, and recent posts listings

We’ve even included the ability to have individual posts be full-width as well.

“Shortcodes”

Our “shortcodes” aren’t really shortcodes… you simply use the standard Bootstrap markup, such as < div class=”whatever”>. If you really like shortcodes instead, you can download either of these plugins. They both work just fine with this theme.

  • Colored buttons
  • Colored message boxes (alerts)
  • Tabbed content areas
  • Collapsible content areas
  • Sliders (carousels)
  • Everything else that the Bootstrap CSS framework has to offer!

Demo and Download This Theme

Demo this theme Demo Flat Bootstrap Theme

Download this theme from the WordPress.org Theme Directory Download Flat Bootstrap Theme

The Flat Bootstrap Child Theme is for users to be able to easily customize the theme.

It includes a stylesheet (style.css) for you to override or add CSS styles. It comes with a functions file (functions.php) in case you want to modify any theme functions. You can also, of course, copy down any of the page or post templates from the parent theme and modify them within your child theme. This way you can still receive updates to the parent theme for bug fixes and new features.

This child theme is included directly in the Flat Bootstrap WordPress theme. Just copy it up to your theme root directory and make your changes.

Flat Bootstrap Developer is a child theme for Flat Bootstrap that strips out all the “extras” so your theme is “light” and you can style it up however you want.

The child theme includes a style.css and functions.php to remove most of the theme’s extra features, javascript, and styles. Specifically:

  • style.css does not include theme-specific styles from the parent theme
  • functions.php removes or changes the following theme features
    • Removes the custom bootstrap CSS and replaces it with the core Bootstrap CSS from the CDN
    • Removes our theme-flat.css stylesheet that has the colored sections and extra buttons in it (btn-hollow and btn-transparent)
    • Removes font-awesome.css (but Bootstrap Glyphicons are still there as they are used by the theme itself)
    • Removes jquerymobile.js (small custom version) and our theme.js that triggers swiping in carousels on touch screens
    • Loads only the required include files, which are for template tags, and adding Bootstrap to the theme.
    • Does not load includes for the theme customizer (custom background, header, etc.), Jetpack continuous scrolling, keyboard navigation on attachment image pages, “extras” included in the TwentyXYZ themes, or plugin recommendations.
    • Changes the site credits a bit, just to show how to override any function in the theme, both in the main functions file or in the included files.

Since this theme is for developers, we are hosting it on github. Download Flat Bootstrap Developer Theme

More Information About Our Themes

Be sure to check out How to Use Our WordPress Themes and our Theme “Shortcodes” Page. You can also check out other other themes that should be ready for release soon as well on our WordPress Themes page.

92 responses to “Flat Bootstrap WordPress Theme”

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    • I have been following Bootstrap 4 closely. There are of course MASSIVE changes to even the core grid system, the spacing, etc. I have been working on another major version update to Flat Bootstrap (v2.0) that still uses Bootstrap 3. I’d release that first and then some bug fixes and possibly some minor enhancements. I’d LOVE to use the new Bootstrap v4 “flexbox”, but IE9 doesn’t support that. Also, its still in Beta and users of my theme have probably built page content off of v4. So there are major decisions to be made and major code updates required. I think I will need to leave the existing Flat Bootstrap at v2.x and release a separate version of it that uses Bootstrap v4. That would allow users to chose if/when they move up, but also then creates confusion and I lose download history, ratings, etc.

  3. Hi, Brandon. My themes support drop-down menus (2 levels) out of the box. They utilize the built in WP custom menu system. You create the menu in WP admin and then assign it to the top nav menu location.

  4. Hi Tim. I’m a software developer but completely unfamiliar with WP. I have a friend who is using WP and your theme, and she wants to make the main menu a dropdown. I’ve tried to navigate through the WP backend but I can’t determine if the theme itself isn’t designed to support a dropdown menu or if it’s something else. I know this is a really stupid question but my lack of knowledge of WP really makes something this simple rather confusing.

  5. Hi! I use flat-bootstrap and created a child-theme. When looking in the functions.php of the parent theme there is the following line (292 in my editor):

    “wp_enqueue_style( ‘flat-bootstrap’, get_stylesheet_uri() );”

    This means that “style.css” is ALWAYS loaded from my child-theme (because of get_stylesheet_uri()) . Shouldn’t it be “get_template_directory()” instead? Or am I getting something wrong?

    Cheers!
    Heiko

  6. Hello
    I am very happy with the flat-bootstrap
    I installed a child theme
    I would change such a parameter
    flat-bootstrap/ css/ theme-flat.css
    After multiple tests, nothing works, I can certainly do it, wrong
    Where can I find a tutorial to explain the procedure
    (Can not find the answer)
    Thank you for the reply and for your work

    • Please check out How to Use our WordPress Themes and the Child Themes page on WordPress.org. It’s great that you are using a child theme as that is definitely what you want to do. But instead of copying down the theme’s CSS and editing it, simply put the styles you want to *override* in the child theme’s style.css.

      Just a heads up… Flat Bootstrap v1.9 (the parent theme for Pratt) will be coming out very soon and I have made significant changes to theme-base.css, theme-flat.css, etc. You definitely don’t want to alter those files.

      • Hi thank you
        If i understand,
        I want to modify (override)
        .content-header {
        padding-top: 35px;
        padding-bottom: 35px;
        }
        which is in theme-base.css

        I just put it (modified) in style.css in the child theme

        Correct?
        Thanks again

    • At first glance, I thought it was the inline “float: right” (for the map and possibly that login section) was not playing nicely with Bootstrap’s grid system. However, since this was working for you in v1.7, but not in v1.8, I think it may be due to this change that I made. From the release notes:

      “Previously on full-width page templates, we used javascript to move content from any plugins to the bottom of the page. For example, to push social sharing buttons below the content. In this release, we do that for all pages and articles, regardless of whether they are full-width or not. For example, social sharing buttons now get moved below the site index page content when using that page template.”

      I’m thinking that it has to have something to do with that. For the next version, I’m going to rethink when and how I’m doing this. For now, I would use the suggestion above from lisajwells to turn off this functionality altogether.

      Since you are using Flat Bootstrap, you can easily copy the /flat-bootstrap-child theme and edit it’s functions.php. Add this somewhere in there:

      //Remove a function from the parent theme
function remove_parent_filter(){ //Have to do it after theme setup, because child theme functions are loaded first
remove_filter( ‘the_content’, ‘xsbf_add_container’, 5, 1 );
remove_filter(‘the_content’, ‘xsbf_end_container’, 1999, 1 );
}
add_action( ‘after_setup_theme’, ‘remove_parent_filter’ );

      That turns off that particular functionality and should fix your problem. Please let me know whether that works or not. If this is causing problems with plugins, I want to rethink how its being handled.

  10. I have just updated to v1.8, and on our events pages (created by the Events Manager plugin), the right-hand-side widget area (Meta etc) have all moved to the bottom of the page. (The other non-events pages are fine). You can see this at http://analytics.org.nz/events/auckland-11-march-how-data-and-analytics-are-transforming-new-zealands-public-sector/ This used to work fine with your theme. Any suggestions? This happens on Firefox and Chrome. Thanks for a great contribution – we really like this theme. Andrew

    • Thanks for your kind words! I am working on some changes as to how the sidebars are called (by ID instead of Name, so as to not cause problems with non-English sites). I’d like to understand what’s going on here to make sure the next version (v1.9) doesn’t have any issues at all with sidebars.

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