Yes. Excellent analogy, and it’s still fun.
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No doubt this is great. Truly it is, but how many hours and hours and hours of tutorials and/or on-your-own learning time and hangouts did you have to spend before you got to the point that you even knew what to ask about?
In the @Jody video she imploringly asked/pointed out, almost apologetically that there’s no manual, no simple overview on how when where and why to start with F6, and rather than listen to that the response is to defend choices made — despite an acknowledgment that people aren’t “grasping “ how to use Foundation 6.
I admire Joe Workman. I truly do. I think the name Workman actually fits him perfectly, but the great beauty of the Mac is it’s intuitive to use and Foundation 6 is not intuitive, and I think @teefers just in this thread alone has been more helpful to me in just explaining how and where to start.
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I just dived right in before watching any videos, but I’m a regular attendee of the Friday Hangouts so I picked up a lot from the pre-release highlights that Joe covered.
I taught myself mostly by converting my F1 projects to F6. No real reason other than self learning as the sites were working perfectly, but a much better workflow than just abstractly messing around with a few stacks. Once Joe started releasing the live stream recordings, I recreated what he was doing with F6, pausing as required. Yes, it might have taken me 3 hours to work through a 1 hour video, but that was time well spent for me.
As with everything I’ve done in life, I soon realised that you only get out of it what you are prepared to put in. I’m lucky as I’m retired so I can now choose how I fill my time. Some people sit on a river bank for hours, others do crossword puzzles, but I work to keep my mind sharp by learning new skills - and Rapidweaver and Foundation are just one of those skills 
Sure, I still have questions, but often there is no ‘wrong way’ of doing something in F6 as there are many ways of doing the same thing - that’s the flexibility I love.
I find this really useful, not just for F6 but for RW in general. It’s a single project file, but it isn’t actually a project and it isn’t meant to be published. Each page might only be something really simple like styling a button, but it’s my ‘scratchpad’ that I can refer to if I can’t quite remember how to do something.
Many of these pages are the result of answering a question on one of the forums. I’ll see if I can resolve the issue in a new blank project and then save that page to my scratchpad project. Next time the same question is asked, I just copy the relevant page to a new project and post the project as my answer to the request for help. Much easier than trying to describe what to do.
Of course, this doesn’t just help the person asking the question, but it help me too as I have to recreate what they are trying to do and learn during the process.
And that screenshot is about half of the pages I have in that scratchpad project. Every now and then I go through those pages and delete those I no longer need. I did think about putting this project file online somewhere, but it’s just too rough and ready to be of much use to anybody but me.
However, ask a question on one of the forums and you might well get one of those pages in the form of an answer to you question
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Albert (@Albertkinng),
I think you need to stop thinking about the Topbar as being the principal part of navigation. In F1 the Topbar was pretty well it. It had a lot of options.
Think of the Topbar stack in F6 as just a container for the navigation elements.
Have a look at this playlist from Joe, other than the last two that a quite long the rest are short (< 10 min) and to the point. The go over how navigation works in F6.
Stop thinking of F6 as being a simple upgrade to Foundation 1. You may have gotten it for the upgrade price, but it is totally different. It works much more like hand-coding. They developed hTML5 and CSS3 to split styling from content. That is exactly how F6 works.
It’s a different way of thinking for most RapidWeaver-stacks users, but once you get your head around it I think you’ll enjoy working that way. When it comes to maintenance down the road you will find it a lot easier to make changes.
Post questions if you have them.
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This is actually a brilliant idea.
Thanks for passing it along.
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Thanks, I will watch the playlist and see if I can do something with F6 the way I want to do it. You have been very helpful and I appreciated a lot the time you took to help in my struggle.
I need to point out something you said that in my opinion is the key of what I see as a problem.
“It works much more like hand-coding.“
Rapidweaver is a tool for the users that don’t know or can’t build a webpage with code. That’s why many of us came from Freeway, Dreamweaver and even from iWeb. For me, since 1994 a text editor was a tool to solve and fix my websites but never for build an entire one. I’m not complaining It’s just a call for attention for those that spend their time making amazing stacks and themes that push forward an amazing app like Rapidweaver but please don’t forget that many of us came to the app looking for a solution because of the lack of knowledge about HTML/CSS. We arrived for the Wysiwyg experience back in the day.
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Thank you for speaking truthfully. One of my primary complaints about Foundation 6 is that I believe I’ve been misled about the product.
Any code is not zero code.
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@Albertkinng I kind of understand what you are saying but it also seems unfair. The beauty of the RW community is a lot of different products are offered that work with RW. It’s only natural for individual developers to create their own unique ways of approaching design challenges.
Creating a framework relative to single function stack takes a lot of thought and a cohesive vision. From what I understand @joeworkman has been entirely successful in this venture. But it’s not the only framework out there: there’s Foundry, IU Kit, and others.
This seems to me a bit like complaining about your stereo system (RW) because you bought a jazz CD (Foundation 6) and you prefer pop or classical music. Just buy another CD.
I don’t use Foundation 6 personally, but it seems it’s been quite clear all along that it’s a very different product from Foundation 1 (just the big increase in version number tells us something big has changed). I applaud the various developers who have worked hard to create unique products. Foundation 6 may not be the best fit for your specific needs. That’s fine. Find another product that meets your own design approach better.
The RW community is made richer by folks who create different sorts of “takes” or “approaches”. I would think traditional themes are better for some users relative to frameworks. And in the frameworks arena there are very different approaches. That’s great! Hopefully the community of developers will continue to offer exciting and different approaches to getting things done.
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Thank you Mathew…
Remember the iPhone 4…
If you don’t want it, don’t buy it!!!
The dead horse has been beaten!!
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I think both @davidfreels and @Albertkinng miss understand what I meant when I said:
works much more like hand-coding
It is nothing like hand-coding a webpage. The result and thought process of separating style from content is what I was talking about. It works like the internet works today.
You don’t need to know how to “code" anything to produce a website with F6.
TRUE!!
So David the image you produced in your post saying “not true!!” isn’t correct, and IMO is an ignorant response. You’ll find people will be much more willing to help you if stop that kind of response. If you don’t understand something INQUIRE COURTEOUSLY and stop blaming the developer for your lack of grasping something.
@joeworkman has bent over backward offering you help:
but you say you don’t have the time, but look at the time you have spent complaining about F6 just on this post.
offer you help:
It’s more of how you think. Probably the number one competitor to RapidWeaver is Blocs app. It works the same way as F6 does. You do all the styling in separate inspectors; you assign class names.
I never used Freeway so I don’t know how it worked, and haven’t touched Dream Weaver since Macromedia owned it (pre-2005) and so much of how the internet works have changed since then it wouldn’t be a good comparison.
F6 will produce great websites without coding. If you were new to RapidWeaver and never used stacks or F1 or Foundry or anything else, I don’t think it’s really any harder to learn. often Re-Learning is more difficult than learning. Break old habits and unlearn before you learn the alternative ways.
If you don’t want the advantages F6 offers (faster pages, flexible design, clean code, etc, etc) you have lots of options.
When F6 was first released (18 months ago) I think it was hard for many people to learn. The 1-hour or 2-hour videos that seemed too on and on weren’t much help. Since then Joe has cut them up into much shorter topics. I would love to see more written Documentation for reference, but I think it’s a lot better and isn’t that hard.
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Doug – the title of this post: " Are you struggling to grasp Foundation 6?"
The clear implication is that a lot of people are still grasping, which admits a certain degree of desperation if not frustration.
These two statements give me a better conceptual understanding of F6 than anything I’ve heard to date. Thank you, now I have a starting off point to better understand this.
I’m going to respectfully disagree, and I’m emphasizing respectfully. As I’ve stated here multiple times, I think Joe is a brilliant guy, but I think he struggles as a teacher. If you go back and watch the video with @Jody, there are a couple of profoundly significant things that occur.
First, the video with @Jody starts 10 minutes late. Clearly there was a miscommunication, and miscommunication is a frequent deficiency that Joe has. It just is. No doubt he’s brilliant. No doubt he knows how to code, but communicating what’s in his head to the rest of us, it’s a struggle. I’m not complaining so much as acknowledging a reality, and Joe is aware of this too; that’s why the title of this post is “Are you struggling to grasp Foundation 6?”
However F6 works, it’s not been communicated.
At the same time, Joe is human, and he’s not perfect, but he’s got F6 on the brink of something really big, but many of his most-loyal peeps still aren’t getting it, and Jody was honestly expressing this, earnestly so, and he blew right past her, basically defending his method of explanation to date. I felt like he stopped listening to her. He interrupted her frequently. That’s not what teachers do.
Go watch. https://youtu.be/xPVQAuXZlV8
In the same video Joe said his Dad is a Mac user and also uses RapidWeaver. That’s great. I’ve asked him if his Dad uses Foundation 6. If not, why not. Or maybe that could be a great starting off point for Joe to see exactly how, when, why, and where RW users are struggling.
He defended himself again in this thread in response to me. It’s not an easy thing to admit a weakness, especially if you’ve spent hours and hours and hours and hours trying to convince folks how easy something is when it’s obviously not.
Maybe it’s just time to admit that you need to bring somebody else in to better explain and teach how this thing works. I think that’s what needs to happen.
I’d nominate @teefers for that. Seriously.
Saturdays are the one day I have set aside to learn F6, when I can.
Zero code
Any coding that’s required is not zero code.
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As I said before, I’m not complaining and not attacking either the dev or the product. I’m happy with RW evolution and how stacks help RW become what it is today. This is my tool, and with it I can pay a house and bring food to the table.
The opinion I had about F1 and F6 is just that, a personal opinion. It’s a very specific one man oriented opinion because I’m the only one struggling with the difference of the two versions as I showed on my vid. I would prefer that my opinion doesn’t turn into a form of humiliation or insults to the greatest devs this community have. If my opinion is kind of offensive to some, I want to apologize in advance because that wasn’t my intention.
All the things I have said I believe I did it with respect and professionalism and I will continue to buy all the greatest stacks you have been developing thru the years. Believe me, thousands of dollars are living in my stacks sidebar and all of them (some legacy now) still make my day a fun and productive one.
With that being said, thanks for your help guys and great advice. Next time I promise think twice before post a personal opinion when the forum is not meant for that.
I let you know if F6 will be as helpful as F1 has been for me as for today.
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Please. It will help me a lot
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This discussion was helpful to me in that I now realize that I’m not the only one who is struggling. I understand that F6 has many advantages but for someone used to the intuitive way of website building like iWeb and Freeway and even F1 was, it’s strikingly different. I’ve tried the demo of the successor to Freeway, X-way (in beta) and found it much more pleasant to work with even though it will take some learning as well—almost fun, not a fight and struggle. This subject really boils down to individual preference and style but it’s great that the discussion is going on. Thanks to all.
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You’re not alone my friend. 
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Is it possible for you to share your scratchpad (as is) as a project file? It can’t hurt for me to at least see how somebody else is learning F6 and will probably help. Thanks if you can.
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THERE IS NO (ZERO) CODING NEEDED!!!
I Don’t get why you think that you have to code to use F6. You can produce any website you can produce with Foundation 1, Foundry, Platform, Source, or any other framework or theme in Foundation 6 without doing a single line of coding.
I see several people trying to compare RapidWeaver to Freeway, iWeb DreamWeaver, and more, they all are different. There is a learning curve with any of these products. I think if you are new to RW and you started learning Foundation 6, you would probably find using one of the more stereotypical frameworks or even a traditional theme non-intuitive and might have a hard time learning.
I would imagine that most folks that came from another product like Freeway, iWeb, Sandvox, DreamWeaver didn’t find RW instinctive at all. Just as if someone that has a lot of experience with RW were to learn one of the other products.
A long time ago I found training users on using very suffocated applications it always seems easier if the person your training knows nothing about the product. They start with a blank slate.
I think that’s why some people who have experience with other products like F1 or Foundry struggle with F6. They expect it to work as the “Other” did.
So my best advice to someone who has some RW experience and wants to learn F6 is to forget F1 (or whatever you were using) and try to start with a blank slate. Treat it as a new product.
Perhaps @joeworkman could do a stream with one of you that has a Foundation 1 site and go through the steps to convert it to an F6 site.
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Doug, F6 may not be like using <> and divs and </>, but learning classes, knowing classes, assigning classes, and then remembering to know and assign classes, to me, that’s coding, as you have so noted.
It’s not zero.
Foundation 6 is a far, far more complicated thing than anything else in the history of RapidWeaver, but I don’t think it’s beyond me; I just have to learn what it is that I don’t know what it is that I have to learn.
I took your suggestion and looked at Blocs after first searching for Blocs here on the RW. Found several references including an interesting post from 2018, just before the release of RW 8.
Blocs has a very clean, very simple web page at BlocsApp.com with demonstrations of “classes” that makes the concept more understandable. There’s also a more-accessible Classes Manager that looks easier to use.
I think.
Tutorials are here, and none are barely longer than 5 minutes. Most are just 2-3 minutes.
See https://youtube.com/user/cazoobi
I’d love it if F6 tutorials were that short, that concise, and so quickly get to the point.
There’s also an organized and concise help page. https://help.blocsapp.com/
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Hi @joeworkman. Yes, I am struggling to grasp Foundation 6. Or, at least I was. After upgrading to F6 I gave up the struggle early on because of my own inability to “get it”. This is when I moved on to other frameworks for some simple smaller sites because building them was similar to F1. Even though I keep F6 up to date, I don’t use it. I haven’t even tried to get familiar with F6 since moving away, but have followed the progress closely almost every day because in my mind I love the concept, love you Joe and everything you create. Just haven’t the time to jump in again.
I still have a large site to transform from F1 to something else and very much want it to be F6 because I see the value of the classes paradigm, site speed and simple source code for authoring this large complicated site.
So, I’m jumping into the conversation here based on davidfreels comments about Blocs app and the Classes Manager. The manager feature looks awesome. I don’t know if F6 currently has something like this as I haven’t looked in quite some time. That seems to be the game changer. Managing the classes needs to be as easy as using Rapidweaver. Maybe it is, I don’t know now, but these great discussions lead me to believe that is the missing link.
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