Stories

Author: Colorlib

Updated: October 2026 · v3.0.0

Credits: Images from Unsplash

Stories is a food and lifestyle blog website template built on Bootstrap 5. It has a yellow and black look with large photo tiles, and it is responsive and mobile-ready. There are six pages: home, about, foods, lifestyle, a single article and contact.

The home page has a fading hero slider, recent stories, featured posts with an author box and search, a video band, holiday recipes, category tiles, counters and a newsletter form. The foods and lifestyle pages are story lists with a sidebar, the article page has nested comments and a comment form, and the contact page has a working contact form and a click-to-load map. Stories gives you a ready-made site for a food blog, a baking diary or a slow-living journal.

What’s new in 3.0

• Bootstrap 5.3.8 (the earlier release used Bootstrap 4 and jQuery), compiled from the included Sass with the proportions the design was drawn with, and plain JavaScript with no jQuery. Swiper 14 replaces Owl Carousel, a video dialog replaces Magnific Popup, and small built-in modules replace the counter and scroll-animation scripts. Lucide SVG icons replace four icon fonts. npm run build (Dart Sass and esbuild) compiles one minified stylesheet and one script.
• Lighter pages: all six pages together went from 22.2 MB and 271 requests to 7.7 MB and 165 requests, and the home page from 5.7 MB to 1.8 MB. Every photo has an AVIF version with the JPEG as the fallback, real dimensions and lazy loading below the first screen, and the full-page preloader is gone.
• No third-party requests: Poppins and Playfair Display are self-hosted, the contact page map is an OpenStreetMap map (no API key needed) that loads only when a visitor clicks “Show map”, the video loads from YouTube’s privacy-enhanced player only after a click, and a Google Analytics 4 snippet stays commented out until you add your own ID.
• Working forms: the contact, comment and newsletter forms send through php/send-email.php, with validation, a spam trap and an in-page message. The sidebar search sends a keyword to the recipe list, which filters its cards.
• Accessibility: a skip link and a main landmark on every page, one h1 per page, a real menu button, labelled form fields and icon links, visible keyboard focus, and text over photos and on the yellow and orange fills meets 4.5:1 contrast.
• Fresh photography: every photo is a licensed Unsplash photo, with credits in the README, and the demo content (author, commenters, address, phone and email) is fictional.
• Documentation: a README, a CHANGELOG and a documentation page are included.