Material Design Lite - need better understanding

[Russell Harrower]

Hi all, for the last 3 days I have been trying to work out how exacly I am to use Material Design on my websites. You see documentation and examples are not clear, and I got more confussed by other sites examples as they did not answer the questions I was looking for.

So I thought maybe i'll ask here and someone here can point me in the right direction (note been designing and coding sites for 10+ years)

1. Is Material Design lite meant to be used standalone or with a framework
   
• If Framework is there one that does not require me installing NPM aka node or using compilers - I hate them as I am using smartyphp as the framework.
2. Does Material Design lite have a community template area - where we can download other templates aka themes and see what they look like in real life.
• I see alot of UI designs but not many of them are coded to html
3. Why was learning bootstrap easier?

Thanks

Russell