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Version: 1.1.alpha.0

Removing Blueprint from Compass in 0.13

By Chris Eppstein

Five years ago, Blueprint CSS was an innovative CSS Framework. It was a boilerplate before H5BP and it was the most popular CSS Grid Framework when the concept was still young.

Blueprint's regular structure and common-sense approach, together with its inherent weaknesses, was a major inspiration for the development of Compass. In fact, Compass started solely as a rejected sass-based toolchain for the blueprint project.

Sadly, the blueprint core team, while having never officially announced that the project is over, has through negligence, caused the project to fall behind. It has not kept up with layout and responsive approaches that are essential to web design in 2012.

Furthermore, there are many new layout mechanisms coming in CSS: columns, box-sizing, regions, grid layout, and flexbox. The future of layout looks bright and we want Sass users to be at the forefront of their adoption, establishing the best practices of 2015 instead using the best practices from 2009.

Given these developments, we have decided that it is time for Compass to get out of the "Grid Business". Starting in 0.13 (our next major release) we will have removed Blueprint from Compass. The stylesheets will be extracted as a plugin so that our users can continue to use it, if they need to. At that time, you can install it with two simple steps:

  1. gem install compass-blueprint
  2. Edit your compass configuration and add: require 'compass-blueprint'

We hope that this means that the Compass community will think more carefully about the grids that they use and whether they meet their project's specific needs.

If you are looking for a grid system for your next site, or to replace blueprint with something more modern. We suggest you look into Susy. It is written by Compass core team member, Eric Suzanne. Susy 1.0 has been completely overhauled to take advantage of modern browsers and the very latest features in Sass 3.2 and Compass 0.13. If you have a favorite grid framework, please feel free to mention it in the comments.

TL;DR Starting in Compass 0.13, blueprint will be extracted from compass and available as a compass extension named compass-blueprint.