Brad–thank you for your reply. It’s always good to know that I’m not entirely crazy. There is a lot to bite off and chew with F6. I downloaded the project files and have been going in and playing around with those to get a handle on this.
It looks to me like we could probably build out a site and then save the whole thing as a template for other/future sites.
I own several ElixirGraphics themes as well as many from Nick Cates as well. These guys have incredible art direction skills that I don’t have, and their themes come with pre-built color selections for various sections of their themes. I’m going into the Master Styles of those themes and choosing their color choices to build out color choices for Site Styles in F6, then saving those Site Styles as Externals so I can drop those now-pre-made Site Styles into F6-built projects. I don’t know how else to do this.
It would be great to have some pre-built Site Styles, but there aren’t any Master Style settings in F6, so it’s a DIY.
Still, once built, these pre-builts become the basis for future projects and probably 90% of building a site (for me) is in the art direction component, which I do find tedious.
Another real advantage of F6 is it dramatically reduces the site load time required for site visitors. This will become increasingly important for SEO and can’t be overemphasized.
I think the web frame skeleton is probably the future for RapidWeaver. We hardly see the release of purely new themes anymore, but we are seeing more and more releases of specific-framework-based themes/stack collections, first with the original Foundation1, then Foundry, Foundry2, Source, UIkit, and then there’s another term I’ve seen floating around for awhile Bootstrap, which I’m guessing is another framework, though I don’t know for sure.
I started using RapidWeaver originally because its basic promise was drag-and-drop web site construction. You didn’t have to first learn coding.
As time has gone on, I’ve learned it’s helpful to learn some coding. When @joeworkman constructed Weavers.Space, he promised “Amazing Websites. Zero Code.” I guess this is technically true with Foundation 6. There is some manual entry of data to direct Site Styles and Swatches to do what you want them to do, and that data in turn becomes code–as best I can tell.
I’m not complaining. I’m learning.
Even if I’m still not technically coding, I might be rubbing up right against it with F6. So far I haven’t been bitten. It doesn’t hurt.
There’s something else about Joe Workman and Foundation 6. I think he’s not only changed RapidWeaver but also Stacks. He’s making both RW and Stacks better, and that’s incredible. One more thing. Since Joe’s overseeing development of the actual underlying Foundation Framework, he is fully-invested in this.
He really does have his heart in this. He is emotionally invested in making sure you and me and all other F6 users are successful in our endeavors, and you can bank on that.
That’s not a small thing; that’s a huge thing.
That’s why I bought in.
Fasten your seat belt. We’re going places.