Frameworks seem to be the in thing and while I’m still kind of old school about this in that I’ll insist upon building things from scratch, I do still use a framework to avoid the hassle of the setup. It’s also imperative that designer/developers understand at least one major framework because hey, they are tools that exist to speed up your development time and you can’t go into every project setting things up from the ground. I’m only going to go over the lesser known frameworks here because knowing jQuery, Bootstrap, Foundation, AngularJS, etc. are pretty much a given. Here are some of the frameworks I’ve been using lately.
Material Design Lite
Gorgeous, well thought out, logical and the documentation is available right on the site along with helpful examples and visual demos. Material Design is a beautiful thing and this framework makes working with it super simple.
Bootply
I prefer Foundation over Bootstrap 9 out of 10 times, but when I do use Bootstrap for a client, I head off to Bootply first. It’s always a good idea to know how the guts of a framework is setup, and once you have that down, using a generator like Bootply will speed up your development time exponentially. Beautifully written and easy to use.
Webix – DataTable
If you ever find yourself having to work with a good amount data, Webix Framework’s DataTable is a treat. Working with tables and tons of data can get frustrating, tedious and downright painful. This takes a little bit of the edge off. Webix has a lot of components as a part of its framework, but the DataTable is by far my favorite.
CakePHP
Code generation and scaffolding for PHP? Gorgeous! This makes writing web apps that have to deal with PHP a snap. And as much as I advocate building PHP from scratch, I will admit it’s a chore unless you have a good framework to smooth things out. I’ve been working with Cake for a few years, and it’s hard to imagine not having it in a workflow.
JointsWP
One of my favorite WordPress Frameworks. Combines the latest version of Foundation into a clean set-up. I have some things I don’t use in Joints, but they’re easy to remove or modify to my liking. It’s one of the fastest and smoothest implementations of Foundation for WordPress I’ve found.
There’s a lot more where that came from as knowing one framework is great, but there are newer, more exciting ones coming out all the time. Have I missed anyway? Share the frameworks you’re using in the comments below!