I had originally planned on waiting to post this blog entry on Thursday, but changed my mind and felt it better to let everyone know today about Foundry 3 upgrade pricing, grace periods, and the thing most people have been asking about — Foundry 3’s release date.
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Well said Adam. I do achieve such scores using Blocs too, but that’s not out of the Box.
Googles Page Speed tool provides decent tips on what to improve. But chasing the 100% in everything is not always worth it. After all, Google never stops complaining and always finds something to improve.
But as long as the user finds a fast, good to navigate site with useful content, that’s all that matters really.
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Well said as well @pumpkin. And to add to it, Google even changes what they’re looking for and sometimes moves the goal posts from time-to-time. We should definitely be striving to make good sites for our visitors first and foremost.
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I forgot to reply to you on this @Erwin-Leerentveld, but I wanted to say that I too really love all of the palette options now, too. I will admit that previously in Foundry 2 I would end up styling things more piecemeal, deviating from my palette and adjusting colors here and there manually as I went. But with the new features in F3 I found pleasure in using the palettes and stuck to them. I think it really made for a more cohesive Foundry 3 site, which you’ll see soon enough.
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Only $65 for the upgrade… that’s awesome!
I know some features from Potion and Thunder are in F3 as standard now, but can we expect expansion packs for F3 too? And will there be new versions of Potion and Thunder favourites (Mega menu, Sort, Seek and Sections come to mind)?
Cheers,
Erwin
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Don’t worry it didn’t read like that at all, that is a really great summary and fantastic news, thanks for that. After I posted the question I had a read up about Bootstrap 5 and see that it includes a lot of accessibility features such as reduced animation/motion effects on modals and similar for browsers that switch the feature off and content labelling etc. I’m aware of the other accessibility choices such as contrast and already consider them, but I create content for screen readers and being able to add descriptions to containers is essential for visually impaired I serve. It was interesting to read also that Bootstrap 5 includes ARIA descripters for added content as standard.
With regards to Lighthouse speed, you may have seen my comments on one of the other forums, I don’t get hangups on speed, I fully understand and respect the purists approach to achieve 100%, but I like feature rich content that makes an engaging experience, I would much rather speed takes a dip for the expense of experience, I don’t fancy being a slave to Google, the de facto Internet police . Regardless of that I was mighty impressed anyway that 98% performance was achieved with my Foundry 2 test site, I wasn’t even trying to strip things down or placing any focus on performance, just seeing instead how I can recreate things and get used to a new system. What I have liked so far with my two weeks of Foundry 2 is that there is so much readily available out of the box, I built the test site using only F2 components, which otherwise would have consisted of a range of different 3rd party elements, so all I am using is the loaded framework components with the exception of animated SVGs and HTML5 embeds. The variety of menu choices has been fantastic playing around with, really speeds the process up and plenty of styling choice. All of this was a bit if a Eureka moment.
So in summary, I am really looking forward to F3, grids, palletes, built in components, web-based blog features with Alloy, very excited. Really glad to have boarded the Foundry train.
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I don’t currently have plans for add-on packs. I am trying to focus on having everything included in the main suite of Foundry tools. After having the add-on packs available for a long time now, I think this is a better approach for users and will cause less confusion about what tools are in what packs, and so forth.
A lot of what you could do with Mega Menu is now possible in the Navigation Bar tool. If there are specific wants from this tool shoot me a direct message and I’ll note them.
Sections won’t be returning. It caused users a great deal of problems due to the limited space available — that said, using the tools built in to Foundry 3 already you should be able to recreate such a layout without needing a tool devoted to just that purpose.
Sort and Seek might return in some form or another. Those two were jQuery heavy tools and since I was eliminating jQuery for speed purposes they were not candidates for F3 — at least not for initial release.
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What happens to Dark Mode in Foundry 3?
Be sure to checkout tomorrow’s post about Blacksmith. 
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Very cool implementation with blacksmith. I found it a way better solution.
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Today’s blog post is live on the Foundry blog, and includes two videos relating to Foundry’s new Blacksmith tool. There’s a lot to take in, so I encourage you to watch the Blacksmith Basics video at a minimum. If you’re interested in Dark Mode features be sure to watch both of them.
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Sections is great when you have solid idea of its strengths and limitations. www.criterion.com uses sections well since their main goal for a new visitor of their site is to show off movie clips which is does well. When constructing a page this people just need to be aware that any amount of large paragraphs off text need to be offloaded to another page via a link from the section.
It might also help if the tool description for sessions also mentioned that you need to keep content minimal when using this tool.
The video tutorial for that old Sections tool did offer that very advice. Again, as I said, you should be able to achieve the same type of full-page design with Foundry 3’s modular tools without needing a dedicated Sections tool. If you’d like to discuss the merits of specific past tools once Foundry 3 has been released you’re welcome to shoot me an email to do so.
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If you’re a more advanced user I want to also mention that with the addition of CSS class fields in Foundry tools you’ll also be able to incorporate Bootstrap 5’s built-in class names to style your content as well.
Bonus
As a bonus video for forum goers today I’d like to share the tutorial video for Foundry 3’s new Container tool:
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Nice. But isn’t that more a Flex container instead of a Grid container? At least the controls I am used from using Flex containers.
Well it uses CSS Grid, so I’d consider it a grid display.
Right, that’s probably fair
Fantastic job Adam. Can’t wait. I’m holding off my new website build until the weekend.
I promise I’ll try and watch all the tuition videos before playing with Foundry 3.
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I’ve been watching all the F3 videos and I’m excited to get going with it. Adam mentions the F3 documentation quite a bit in the videos but I haven’t been able to find it anywhere. In the Blacksmith Basics video description there was a link to the documentation but it goes to a 404 not found page for me. Does anyone have any insights?
Thanks
The documentation will be available at launch when the new updated Foundry site goes live.
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