I found a thread on this topic, but it´s three years old - so it would be nice to get some fresh opinions.
Been a happy user of Foundation for some time, but after F6 launched it has been a struggle. I really love F6 for its cool features, but its learning curve is steep and the use of swatches made a mess in my brain.
Anyone that has tried them all, what is your opinion between the two/three?
(I´m hoping for Foundry2+Thunder&Potion Pack to be like a powerfull hybrid between Foundation1 (user friendly) and Foundation6 (awesome features).
I’ve got both. Foundation 6 is incredibly powerful, BUT with great power comes great complexity. It’s way too much for my 54-yr old brain, and I’ve struggled too. Swatches are a killer feature, but even simple things like positioning content feel way too convoluted to me.
Foundry 2 (and the add on packs) is WAY more accessible to me. It just works.
Case in point - Menus. I tried to replicate a responsive menu in both Foundry & Foundation. Foundry Mega Menu just did everything I needed - top bar on desktop/tablet, and hamburger drop down on mobile - which slid over the top of the page content.
Foundation, I could not get the hamburger to slide over the content, it just pushed it down the page. Swatches are a brilliant idea, no question, but I could not figure out how to make it slide over. Several questions on the F6 forum didn’t get me the answers I needed, so switched back to Foundry.
I LOVE Joe’s work, but it’s written by a (genius) techie for techies. Foundry is for the rest of us. And don’t forget Alloy 3 - I had my blog converted with Droplets and Embeds done for my site in less than 2 hours.
And Adam’s support is second to none - I’m by no means a techie OR a web designer, and he’s always helped resolve any issues I’ve had (99% my fault) without making me feel dumb.
You won’t go wrong with Foundry.
Hope this helps - happy to answer (as best I can) any further queries.
Adam (not THAT one)
EDIT: And the Elixir Graphics YouTube channel has videos explaining pretty much every component stack - well worth a watch to give you a feel of how it all hangs together.
Thank you Adam, your answer helped me out a lot, I just purchased Foundry with Thunder and Potion! Now I can start to play
Will also look more into Alloy.
Like you, I found Foundation 6 to be more work. I’m familiar with CSS and understand where Joe is trying to go, but it made working with my site more labor intensive. I tried to do a simple conversion of the existing site from Foundation to Foundation 6 and it was a real slog. I finally, gave up and moved to Foundry. The learning curve was relatively low and the conversion was easy and quick.
All that said, I respect Joe’s RW stacks and the flexibility he is trying to give website developers with F6. It just seems as if he is shifting more of the burden to the website builder. Foundation was an excellent product and I only changed over to Foundry because I suspected Joe would stop supporting Foundation in a year ot two and I didn’t want to go into panic mode at the last moment.
I installed Foundation some time ago and started fooling around with it. I have some great Stacks made by Joe Workman, they are all great solid pieces of work. However, the Foundation learning curve was an issue for me as well.
Foundry (along with Potion and Thunder) makes me happy. It’s so much fun to play with and once you get to know your way around it’s easy as cake to build websites. I should have purchased Foundry a lot sooner, it would have saved me a lot of money.
And as mentioned here before, Adam’s support is top. If you don’t find answers in this community you will be helped anyway.
It’s been two days with Foundry and i love it!
Still much to learn (and discover), and that i’m really looking forward to.
I have a lot of questions, but i’ll hold them back for now, the documentation and tutorials has covered most of the answers i’ve seeked so far and it is a nice way for me to learn.
Must not forget to thank all of you for your replies,
the Elixir fourm feels like one of those good places to be
My brain is 80 years old and I don’t want to spend the remaining moments I have learning to use F6 and swatches so am considering switching to Foundry. My concern is how tough it will be to convert my 3 sites to Foundry. Can anyone give me an idea as to how this process would work and how hard it would be.
give it a try. It’s defenitely the framework with a much more flat learning curve.
And there are Tutorials for nearly everything you got to know. So it’s not hard.
It depends on your 3 sites.
@HAppel It’s hard to fully answer your question without knowing more details about your 3 sites. But, as @HerrSchulz has mentioned, I find Foundry very intuitive to use. The video tutorials are great, and the written documentation is thorough.
You may want 1 or more of the “add on” packs that come with Foundry to duplicate your current sites. So check those out as well.
Strategically I’d think there are at least 2 approaches:
Create the new version of a site is a hidden location that gets published but is unseen until you are done. This is probably what I’d do. So if the domain for one site is: “mywebsite.com” then I’d put the hidden website at “hidden.mywebsite.com” as a subdomain. If you already have something like PageSafe or Sitelok then you can also make sure outsiders can’t access any of the pages.
Make the changes incrementally. As far as I know a RW project can combine Foundry and Foundation. So if you have 30 pages on one site, start by changing page 30 over to Foundry: swap out theme and build it. This is an incremental approach and potentially less stressful. However, I’d definitely back up, back up, back up. RW offers a very good option to back up a project (see Publishing preferences): so turn that on. I’d also name my projects incrementally: for example MyProject-2022-12-07 for today’s work, then MyProject-2022-12-12 when you next work on the project. This way is something goes wrong (and at 80, you know it can) then you can always go back to an earlier version of your project work.
Of course, you could jump in and replace the whole RW project from Foundation to Foundry in one go. I have no idea how large your projects are (e.g. how many pages, how many images, etc. etc.) so at this point I’m only suggesting some general approaches that may or may not be optimal for your situation.
Hi
While using your original file as a template, you will recreate the site using foundry stacks. For example where your foundation site has the site styles stack, top bar stack, etc., you would build your new foundry site with its base stack, then nav bar stack, etc. There is no one step conversion. At a quick glance at your sites it doesn’t look like it should be a problem. It could be done in a day depending on how fast you work.
