Tag: Helper classes

Bootstrap Lesson 5: Basic Bootstrap Helper Classes

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Hello everybody,

Michael here, and today’s lesson is all about basic helper classes in Bootstrap. Well, in my previous lesson Bootstrap Lesson 4: Jumbotrons and Image Carousels I briefly mentioned Bootstrap helper classes when creating Jumbotrons. In this post, I want to spend some time explaining how the helper classes I mentioned in my previous post work.

What are Bootstrap helper classes exactly? Well, they’re the special classes in Bootstrap that allow you to set features such as color and padding, among other things. To better explain Bootstrap helper classes, I’ll use my examples from my previous post (the post linked above).

Padding and margin classes

Let’s start off by exploring Bootstrap padding classes. But before we do that, let’s take a look at this code from my previous post used to create a basic Bootstrap Jumbotron:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.0/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" integrity="sha384-gH2yIJqKdNHPEq0n4Mqa/HGKIhSkIHeL5AyhkYV8i59U5AR6csBvApHHNl/vI1Bx" crossorigin="anonymous">
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.0/dist/js/bootstrap.bundle.min.js" integrity="sha384-A3rJD856KowSb7dwlZdYEkO39Gagi7vIsF0jrRAoQmDKKtQBHUuLZ9AsSv4jD4Xa" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<head>
  <body>
    <div class="mt-4 p-5 bg-light text-black">
      <h1>Michael's photos</h1>
      <p>Photos of me from my phone's camera roll</p>
    </div>
  </body>
</head>

Pay attention to the p-5 line. The p-5 line-or rather, any line that begins with a p, denotes padding for an element (in this example, the Jumbotron)-the p helper class allows you to change the element’s padding.

Bootstrap also has an m helper class, which allows you to change the element’s margins.

  • In case you forgot the difference between padding and margins, padding is the space between an element’s border (whether visible or not) and the element’s content-like this Jumbotron’s border and it’s content. On the other hands, margins are the space around an element’s border-like the space between the Jumbotron’s border(s) and the edge(s) of the webpage.

Now, two important things to know about padding and margin classes are the ability to set the size and locations of the padding and margins.

Bootstrap has seven options to set the location of the padding and margins:

  • t-set the margin or padding to the top side of the element
  • b-set the margin or padding to the bottom side of the element
  • l-set the margin or padding to the left side of the element
  • r-set the margin or padding to the right side of the element
  • x-set the margin or padding to both the left and right sides of the element
  • y-set the margin or padding to both the top and bottom sides of the element
  • blank-set the margin or padding to all four sides of the element

Bootstrap also has seven options to set the size of the padding and margins:

  • 0-include no margins or padding
  • 1-set the margins or padding of the element to 0.25 pixels (by default)
  • 2-set the margins or padding of the element to 0.5 pixels (by default)
  • 3-set the margins or padding of the element to 1 pixel (by default)
  • 4-set the margins or padding of the element to 1.5 pixels (by default)
  • 5-set the margins or padding of the element to 3 pixels (by default)
  • auto-auto-sets the padding of any element (only used if the element’s margins are set to auto)

To set the location and sizing of an element’s margins or padding, follow this syntax: [m/p][location]-[sizing]. The m or p will always come first to indicate whether you want to add margins or padding to the element, then the location of the margins/padding will be listed. If you want to specify a sizing for your margins/padding (other than the default sizing), the sizing of the margins/padding will be listed after the hyphen.

Pay attention to the lines mt-4 and p-5 from the above example. The line mt-4 sets the Jumbotron’s top margins to “4” (1.5 pixels). The line p-5 set’s the Jumbotron’s padding to “5” (3 pixels). Notice how there isn’t another letter in the p-5 line; because of this, the padding is set to 3 pixels across all corners of the element rather than just a single corner.

Background classes

Next, we’ll explore Bootstrap background helper classes, which are denoted with bg (for instance, bg-light in the above example).

The Bootstrap background helper classes serve as contextual classes that help give your background some more meaning. There are ELEVEN possible Bootstrap background helper classes, which include:

  • bg-primary-turns your background dark blue
  • bg-secondary-turns your background grey
  • bg-success-turns your background green
  • bg-danger-turns your background red
  • bg-warning-turns your background yellow
  • bg-info-turns your background light blue
  • bg-light-turns your background light grey
  • bg-dark-turns your background dark
  • bg-body and bg-white-turns your background white
  • bg-transparent-makes your background transparent

In the previous example, I used the bg-light helper class to give my Jumbotron a light background. Now, just for the heck of it, let’s see what the Jumbotron background would look like with a different style (pay attention to the highlighted line of code):

<!DOCTYPE html>
<link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.0/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" integrity="sha384-gH2yIJqKdNHPEq0n4Mqa/HGKIhSkIHeL5AyhkYV8i59U5AR6csBvApHHNl/vI1Bx" crossorigin="anonymous">
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.0/dist/js/bootstrap.bundle.min.js" integrity="sha384-A3rJD856KowSb7dwlZdYEkO39Gagi7vIsF0jrRAoQmDKKtQBHUuLZ9AsSv4jD4Xa" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<head>
  <body>
    <div class="mt-4 p-5 bg-info text-black">
      <h1>Michael's photos</h1>
      <p>Photos of me from my phone's camera roll</p>
    </div>
  </body>
</head>

In order to give my Jumbotron the light blue color, all I did was change the bg class from bg-light to bg-info. Pretty neat stuff right?

Here’s another example of Bootstrap background helper classes in action, taken from my post Bootstrap Lesson 2: Typography and Tables:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <title>Bootstrap Example</title>
  <meta charset="utf-8">

  <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.4.1/css/bootstrap.min.css">

</head>
<body>

<div class="container">
  <h1>2021 AFC Standings</h1>
  <table class="table">
    <thead>
      <tr>
        <th>Team</th>
        <th>Record</th>
        <th>Seeding</th>
      </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
      <tr class="success">
        <td>Tennessee Titans</td>
        <td>12-5</td>
        <td>1</td>
      </tr>
      <tr class="success">
        <td>Kansas City Chiefs</td>
        <td>12-5</td>
        <td>2</td>
      </tr>
      <tr class="success">
        <td>Buffalo Bills</td>
        <td>11-6</td>
        <td>3</td>
      </tr>
      <tr class="success">
        <td>Cincinnati Bengals</td>
        <td>10-7</td>
        <td>4</td>
      </tr>
      <tr class="warning">
        <td>Las Vegas Raider</td>
        <td>10-7</td>
        <td>5</td>
      </tr>
      <tr class="warning">
        <td>New England Patriots</td>
        <td>10-7</td>
        <td>6</td>
      </tr>
      <tr class="warning">
        <td>Pittsburgh Steelers</td>
        <td>9-7-1</td>
        <td>7</td>
      </tr>
      <tr class="danger">
        <td>Indianapolis Colts</td>
        <td>9-8</td>
        <td>8</td>
      </tr>
      <tr class="danger">
        <td>Miami Dolphins</td>
        <td>9-8</td>
        <td>9</td>
      </tr>
      <tr class="danger">
        <td>Los Angeles Chargers</td>
        <td>9-8</td>
        <td>10</td>
      </tr>
      <tr class="danger">
        <td>Cleveland Browns</td>
        <td>8-9</td>
        <td>11</td>
      </tr>
      <tr class="danger">
        <td>Baltimore Ravens</td>
        <td>8-9</td>
        <td>12</td>
      </tr>
      <tr class="danger">
        <td>Denver Broncos</td>
        <td>7-10</td>
        <td>13</td>
      </tr>
      <tr class="danger">
        <td>New York Jets</td>
        <td>4-13</td>
        <td>14</td>
      </tr>
      <tr class="danger">
        <td>Houston Texans</td>
        <td>4-13</td>
        <td>15</td>
      </tr>
      <tr class="danger">
        <td>Jacksonville Jaguars</td>
        <td>3-14</td>
        <td>16</td>
      </tr>
    </tbody>
  </table>
</div>

</body>
</html>

In this example, I used three Bootstrap background helper classes (success, warning, and danger) to color in each row according to each AFC team’s playoff standings in 2021 (division clinched, wildcard, did not qualify for playoffs). Granted, I didn’t explicitly use the bg-success, bg-danger, and bg-warning background classes, but the idea is still the same-to color in the table rows according to a certain context.

Text helper classes

Last but not least, I want to explain text helper classes (such as the one you’ll see in the line text-black).

In the Jumbotron example, I used the line text-black to set the color of the Jumbotron text to black. Seems pretty self-explanatory, right? Well, the text helper classes-unlike the padding, margin, and background helper classes-are quite versatile, as there are several ways to modify Bootstrap text.

  • If you want to change the color of text using Bootstrap helper classes, you can only do so by writing the name of the color (so no HEX/RGB/other colorscale codes here)

Text alignment

The first such way to modify Bootstrap text-aside from changing the color-is by changing the text’s alignment. Let’s see how that would work with the Jumbotron from the previous post (pay attention to the highlighted line of code):

<!DOCTYPE html>
<link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.0/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" integrity="sha384-gH2yIJqKdNHPEq0n4Mqa/HGKIhSkIHeL5AyhkYV8i59U5AR6csBvApHHNl/vI1Bx" crossorigin="anonymous">
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.0/dist/js/bootstrap.bundle.min.js" integrity="sha384-A3rJD856KowSb7dwlZdYEkO39Gagi7vIsF0jrRAoQmDKKtQBHUuLZ9AsSv4jD4Xa" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<head>
  <body>
    <div class="mt-4 p-5 bg-light text-center text-black">
      <h1>Michael's photos</h1>
      <p>Photos of me from my phone's camera roll</p>
    </div>
  </body>
</head>

First of all, you’ll noticed I changed the Jumbotron’s background class back to bg-light, but that isn’t too important here.

What is important here is how I changed the alignment of the text-in this case, I center-aligned all text in the Jumbotron. All I had to do was add the line text-center to center the text.

  • In case you’re wondering how to center-align the text and keep its black color, you’ll need to add text-center and text-black as separate lines. Trying something like text-center-black or text-black-center won’t work-while these lines won’t give you any errors, the text won’t be centered in your Jumbotron.

There are two other ways to align your text in Bootstrap-text-start and text-end, which will left-align and right-align your text, respectively.

Text wrapping

Next, let’s explore how to utilize text wrapping in Bootstrap. First off, let’s see an example of text wrapping in the Jumbotron (pay attention to the highlighted line of code):

<!DOCTYPE html>
<link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.0/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" integrity="sha384-gH2yIJqKdNHPEq0n4Mqa/HGKIhSkIHeL5AyhkYV8i59U5AR6csBvApHHNl/vI1Bx" crossorigin="anonymous">
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.0/dist/js/bootstrap.bundle.min.js" integrity="sha384-A3rJD856KowSb7dwlZdYEkO39Gagi7vIsF0jrRAoQmDKKtQBHUuLZ9AsSv4jD4Xa" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<head>
  <body>
    <div class="mt-4 p-5 bg-light text-center text-black text-wrap">
      <h1>Michael's photos</h1>
      <p>Photos of me from my phone's camera roll. These are pretty awesome photos if you ask me. Just take a look at all the amazing scenery I managed to capture. Y'all should take a look. You won't believe what picture 3 looks like. I swear!</p>
</head>

To show you how text-wrapping works in Bootstrap, I added a bunch of rambling text to the <p> tag of the Jumbotron to ensure it was long enough to wrap. To wrap the text, I simply added the line text-wrap to the Jumbotron’s <div class-="..."> tag.

If you didn’t want the text-wrapping in the Jumbotron, replace the text-wrap class with the text-nowrap class. Here’s what the Jumbotron would look like with no text-wrapping:

Interestingly, Bootstrap doesn’t try to squeeze all the text into the Jumbotron. Rather, the text spills outside the Jumbtron, so you’ll need to scroll across the window to read the entire document. Pretty user-unfriendly, amirite?

Text transformation

Next up, let’s explore text transformation in Bootstrap. But first, a little demo (pay attention to the highlighted line of code):

<!DOCTYPE html>
<link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.0/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" integrity="sha384-gH2yIJqKdNHPEq0n4Mqa/HGKIhSkIHeL5AyhkYV8i59U5AR6csBvApHHNl/vI1Bx" crossorigin="anonymous">
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.0/dist/js/bootstrap.bundle.min.js" integrity="sha384-A3rJD856KowSb7dwlZdYEkO39Gagi7vIsF0jrRAoQmDKKtQBHUuLZ9AsSv4jD4Xa" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<head>
  <body>
    <div class="mt-4 p-5 bg-light text-center text-black text-wrap text-capitalize">
      <h1>Michael's photos</h1>
      <p>Photos of me from my phone's camera roll. These are pretty awesome photos if you ask me. Just take a look at all the amazing scenery I managed to capture. Y'all should take a look. You won't believe what picture 3 looks like. I swear!</p>
</head>

In this example, I used the line text-capitalize to capitalize the text. However, text-capitalize doesn’t do what you think it might do-capitalize the entire text. Rather, text-capitalize only captializes the first letter of each word in the Jumbotron and leaves all other letters lowercase.

If you’re looking to capitalize the entire text, replace text-capitalize with text-uppercase. Similarly, if you’re looking to lowercase the entire text, replace text-capitalize with text-lowercase.

Font sizes

The next way you can modify your text in Bootstrap is through modifying font sizes. Before we discuss this, here’s a little demo for y’all (pay attention to the highlighted line of code):

<!DOCTYPE html>
<link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.0/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" integrity="sha384-gH2yIJqKdNHPEq0n4Mqa/HGKIhSkIHeL5AyhkYV8i59U5AR6csBvApHHNl/vI1Bx" crossorigin="anonymous">
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.0/dist/js/bootstrap.bundle.min.js" integrity="sha384-A3rJD856KowSb7dwlZdYEkO39Gagi7vIsF0jrRAoQmDKKtQBHUuLZ9AsSv4jD4Xa" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<head>
  <body>
    <div class="mt-4 p-5 bg-light text-center text-black text-wrap text-capitalize fs-1">
      <h1>Michael's photos</h1>
      <p>Photos of me from my phone's camera roll. These are pretty awesome photos if you ask me. Just take a look at all the amazing scenery I managed to capture. Y'all should take a look. You won't believe what picture 3 looks like. I swear!</p>
</head>

Unlike most of the other text modifications we’ve discussed, the text modification for font looks a little different since it uses the fs (font size) helper class-and yet, it still works to change the text’s font size.

In this example, I used the fs-1 helper class to change the Jumbotron text’s font size and as you can see, the fs-1 helper class makes the text quite large! Why might that be?

Well, there are six possible values for the fs helper classes-ranging from 1 to 6. fs-1 creates the largest text, while fs-6 creates the smallest text. Does this concept sound familiar to you? If so, it’s because HTML headers also have six possible values-ranging from 1 to 6, with 1 creating the largest header and 6 creating the smallest header.

Font effects

Now that we’ve dicsussed modifying the font size, let’s turn our attention to font effects in Bootstrap-things like boldening and italicizing the text. Take a look at the example Jumbotron code below (and pay attention to the highlighted text):

<!DOCTYPE html>
<link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.0/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" integrity="sha384-gH2yIJqKdNHPEq0n4Mqa/HGKIhSkIHeL5AyhkYV8i59U5AR6csBvApHHNl/vI1Bx" crossorigin="anonymous">
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.0/dist/js/bootstrap.bundle.min.js" integrity="sha384-A3rJD856KowSb7dwlZdYEkO39Gagi7vIsF0jrRAoQmDKKtQBHUuLZ9AsSv4jD4Xa" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<head>
  <body>
    <div class="mt-4 p-5 bg-light text-center text-black fw-bold">
      <h1>Michael's photos</h1>
      <p>Photos of me from my phone's camera roll. These are pretty awesome photos if you ask me. Just take a look at all the amazing scenery I managed to capture. Y'all should take a look. You won't believe what picture 3 looks like. I swear!</p>
</head>

In this example, I made all of the text on the Jumbotron bold with the line fw-bold (granted, that doesn’t seem to affect the <h1> tag’s appearance all that much). Simple, but pretty neat right?

Some other text effects you could use on your Bootstrap text include:

  • fw-normal-no text effect (this seems quite redunant to include if you ask me)
  • fw-light-light text
  • fst-italic-italicized text
  • fst-normal-normal font style text (also quite redunant, but Bootstrap includes it anyway)
  • fw-bolder-this will make the text bolder than its parent element
  • fw-lighter-this will make the text lighter than its parent element

As you can see, we’ve got several different text effects to use with Bootstrap text. As you can also see, there are TWO different helper classes for text effects-fw (font weight) and fst (font styling). The fact that text effects have two different helper classes is unique, as all of the other text modifications we’ve discussed and will discuss only have one helper class.

Line spacings

Next up, we’ll discuss line spacings in text. But first, a little demo with our Jumbotron (which you should be quite familiar with by now, and as always, pay attention to the highlighted line of code):

<!DOCTYPE html>
<link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.0/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" integrity="sha384-gH2yIJqKdNHPEq0n4Mqa/HGKIhSkIHeL5AyhkYV8i59U5AR6csBvApHHNl/vI1Bx" crossorigin="anonymous">
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.0/dist/js/bootstrap.bundle.min.js" integrity="sha384-A3rJD856KowSb7dwlZdYEkO39Gagi7vIsF0jrRAoQmDKKtQBHUuLZ9AsSv4jD4Xa" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<head>
  <body>
    <div class="mt-4 p-5 bg-light text-center text-black lh-lg">
      <h1>Michael's photos</h1>
      <p>Photos of me from my phone's camera roll. These are pretty awesome photos if you ask me. Just take a look at all the amazing scenery I managed to capture. Y'all should take a look. You won't believe what picture 3 looks like. I swear!</p>
</head>

Just like the font size modification I previously discussed, the line spacing modifications don’t use the text helper class. Rather, the line spacing modifications use the lh (line height) helper class-as you can see from the above example, I use lh-lg to change the line spacing in my Jumbotron.

There are three other options to change the line spacing in Bootstrap text-lh-1 (which gives the smallest line spacing), lh-sm (which gives slightly bigger line spacing), and lh-base (which gives the default line spacing). lh-lg gives you the largest possible line spacing in Bootstrap.

Underline and strokethrough

Last but not least, let’s discuss how to add underlines and strokethrough effects to your Bootstrap text. Here are two demos on how to do just that, first with the underline effect (pay attention to the highlighted line of code):

<!DOCTYPE html>
<link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.0/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" integrity="sha384-gH2yIJqKdNHPEq0n4Mqa/HGKIhSkIHeL5AyhkYV8i59U5AR6csBvApHHNl/vI1Bx" crossorigin="anonymous">
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.0/dist/js/bootstrap.bundle.min.js" integrity="sha384-A3rJD856KowSb7dwlZdYEkO39Gagi7vIsF0jrRAoQmDKKtQBHUuLZ9AsSv4jD4Xa" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<head>
  <body>
    <div class="mt-4 p-5 bg-light text-center text-black lh-lg text-decoration-underline">
      <h1>Michael's photos</h1>
      <p>Photos of me from my phone's camera roll. These are pretty awesome photos if you ask me. Just take a look at all the amazing scenery I managed to capture. Y'all should take a look. You won't believe what picture 3 looks like. I swear!</p>
</head>

Now here’s what the same Jumbotron text would look like with a strokethrough effect:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.0/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" integrity="sha384-gH2yIJqKdNHPEq0n4Mqa/HGKIhSkIHeL5AyhkYV8i59U5AR6csBvApHHNl/vI1Bx" crossorigin="anonymous">
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.2.0/dist/js/bootstrap.bundle.min.js" integrity="sha384-A3rJD856KowSb7dwlZdYEkO39Gagi7vIsF0jrRAoQmDKKtQBHUuLZ9AsSv4jD4Xa" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<head>
  <body>
    <div class="mt-4 p-5 bg-light text-center text-black lh-lg text-decoration-line-through">
      <h1>Michael's photos</h1>
      <p>Photos of me from my phone's camera roll. These are pretty awesome photos if you ask me. Just take a look at all the amazing scenery I managed to capture. Y'all should take a look. You won't believe what picture 3 looks like. I swear!</p>
</head>

In both examples, I use the text-decoration helper class to add some text decoration effects to the Jumbotron text. In this case, I added an underline effect with the line text-decoration-underline and added a strokethrough effect with the line text-decoration-line-through.

There’s also a third text decoration effect within the text-decoration helper class-text-decoration-none. However, this will only work with hyperlinks, as the text-decoration-none effect will only remove all text decorations within hyperlinks, so if you tried to use this effect on something like the Jumbotron from the above example, it won’t work.

Thanks for reading,

Michael