Foundry After Foundation

I’ve been using RW for quite a while and Foundation has been my default framework. I’m curious to hear from anybody who has used both frameworks and how you feel they compare? A major point of interest for me is whether Foundry is easier and faster to build similar websites.

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I use both and have now built many sites and created Foundry & Foundation projects.

Your question about ease of use and speed is very easy to answer.

Ease of use: Generally, in Foundry, there are less settings and what settings there are, often don’t need altering because the default settings have been carefully chosen to look just right. Adams design flair is evident here. This means there is less tweaking with spacing in Foundry. There is good and thorough up to date documentation and RW7 based videos if you need it, all in one place. Overall, easier to use and has a shorter learning curve IMHO.

Speed: Foundry is noticeably faster in my experience, to Preview and use in Edit mode. A big contributor to this is I think that there are stacks such as Jumbotron or Banner which are just one single Foundry stack that would need many stacks inside stacks to create in Foundation. Also Foundry uses child stacks throughout which I am told speeds up Preview. Don’t be too concerned about less settings because Foundry is easy to adjust with a basic knowledge of CSS.

If you are coming from the Foundation world you will be blown away by some of the Foundry stacks but will miss the flexible form stacks, no image warehousing, some TopBar features and great 3rd party Foundation stacks. However, now that the Potion add-on pack is available this completely puts Foundry far ahead with many functions that Foundation can’t do without additional often expensive 3rd party stacks. Of course now there are plenty of free image warehouse solutions. In this respect Foundry + Potion is very rich in current design trend stacks whereas Foundation + Addon 1 & 2 feels dated and comes from the pre Hero 2014 world. This may or may not be important but compare the demo sites for both and make your own mind up.

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I totally agree to what has been said by webdeersign. foundry feels just smoother and is a pleasure to work with!
the only downside I see with foundry in everyday work:
sometimes I am missing an option here and there to tweak a detail the way I want it to be. for example I can not choose a custom color where I expected such an option or I have no option to align content horizontally and stuff of that nature.
My impression is, foundation tends to have more options in stacks settings. Sometimes that´s a pro, sometimes that´s con; depending on the situation.

At least since potion came out, foundry is fully equipped to build great sites without using 3rd party stacks at all (but of course you can - almost every third party stack I used so far performed very well in foundry)

One last thing: BWD stacks are well integrated into foundation or even foundation only, but I assume you are aware of that aspect.

I am indeed very familiar with BWD stacks. A few are Foundation only such as Grummage and MagicGellan, but I believe I am correct in saying that the majority are framework independent and work perfectly in Foundry and other frameworks.

I have used many BWD stacks with Foundry and they work perfectly and brilliantly as always.

To align stuff horizontally I recommend Match Height (just as much for Foundation as Foundry).

Thanks for the feedback. I’m very familiar with Foundation and find it can do pretty much anything. The downside is that relatively simple sites seem to take much longer than I feel they really should. It’s partly down to the choice of stack settings, but more often down to very slow page previews with frequent spinning ball.

I’ve experimented with Blocs and it’s lightening fast in comparison, but I’m a lot more familiar with RW at this point and have a major investment in stacks. I’m surprised to hear that Foundry doesn’t include an option for warehousing within the image stacks.

I’ve read somewhere that warehousing will be part of RapidWeaver core features, so I can see the reasoning on why @elixirgraphics is not doing such implementation.

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@vmcosta is correct. It looks like Realmac is working to add such a feature to RapidWeaver called Remote Resources. If that gets added in and I need to do something to support it, I will look into doing so.

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I saw something about what Realmac are doing for remote resources and it looked like they were making it over complicated, but I guess it’s just a beta and they might improve it.

RM are trying to do something with warehoused image support. What they have discussed in the 7.5beta looks just an enhancement of the Resources folder and a very long way from well implemented warehoused and remote file support. A proper media local and remote manager is required as a minimum. IMHO I can’t see how it can work in the current version of Stacks without modification of existing stacks that use the standard stacks image well. I hope they pull a rabbit out of the hat here.

Anyway this is digressing a bit.

Lack of warehoused images was initially a show stopper for me. However, with so many 3rd part stacks that offer warehoused image support, it is no big deal to use those stacks but is frustrating to not be able to use the Foundry image stacks when you need to use warehoused images.

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