šŸš€ Foundation 6 is here! Welcome to the Future of Web Design

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Purchase Foundation 6 Here

I am so excited to finally be able to share Foundation 6 with you today. A lot of blood sweat and tears went into getting it released in 2019.

Foundation paved the way for how so many of us design websites in RapidWeaver now. We can design websites with Foundation today that we could only dream of 5 years ago. But itā€™s time to shake things up again because I know that we can do better.

Foundation 6 starts an entirely new paradigm of designing websites with RapidWeaver. I believe that it will define how we build the next generation of websites with Stacks and RapidWeaver for years to come.

Foundation 6 Framework

F6 uses the latest version of the Foundation Framework. This framework is used by over 300,000 developers worldwide alongside large brands such as Apple, Adobe, Disney and many more. They choose it because of its power, flexibility and performance.

The F6 stacks ship with every component from the framework. It contains all of the basics that you will need to build a solid website.

Need for Speed

I have spent an excruciating amount of time agonizing over the performance of the F6 stacks. I am glad to say that they are faster in every way. The features detailed below all will build the full story on how all aspects of building a website are now faster.

  • The entire design process has been streamlined. This make the overall time to build and maintain sites will be drastically reduced.
  • Working with F6 inside RapidWeaver is most cases 10x+ faster in both Edit Mode as Preview. Gone are the days of jumpy edit mode interfaces and waiting for your page to preview.
  • Your published sites will be lean and mean. The size of your webpageā€™s HTML can be reduced up to 70% or more.

Swatches

Swatches are arguably the biggest new feature in F6. They are the driving force behind the new design workflows. Swatches allow you to centralize all of the styles throughout your entire site in one place.

This is important because it ensure that all of our layouts and styles are consistent on every web page. It also means that you now have one place to edit our styles. This will save a ton or time going from page to page adjusting sizes and colors.

Less is definitely more now

You may expect that in order for something to become more powerful and flexible, it needs more settings. F6 definitely debunks this myth.

You will notice that most F6 stacks only have a handful of settings. This is one reason why they are so fast to use and preview. The good news is, these are all that you need. Why? Because of swatches!

Traditionally if you wanted to change styles (e.g. background or font sizes) inside of a stack, settings would be added to said stack in order to do that. But now that we have a background swatch there is no need for background settings inside other stacks. You simply add a background swatch to the page with your styles. Then you assign that swatch to as many stacks as you want using a class (sort of like a key).

Swatches are so easy to use that you wonā€™t be asking for CSS help anymore!

Published Code is Sexy

I am proud to say that web pages made with Foundation 6 will be virtually indistinguishable from websites that were hand coded. There is up to 70% less HTML. This will definitely boost your Page Speed scores!

Not only is the HTML super clean now, all of the code exported by the Foundation is super optimized to ensure that its the smaller size possible. It takes up less space than a single average image on your site.

Accessibility (A11Y/ARIA)

Accessibility is becoming extremely important with all of the legal actions take against some companies recently. We need to ensure that our websites can be accessed by all people.

Foundation 6 does all of the heavy work behind the scenes to ensure that our sites are accessible. This is especially true with Forms.

FREE Templates

There are over 160 stacks under the hood inside F6. That is a lot to learn. In order to speed up the learning process and help you build sites faster, I am supplying a set of pre-made templates for free!

At launch there are 15 different templates with different layouts, form setups, menus and more. I plan on release more free templates over time. I have at least 10 more on my todo list that you should get soon. The templates stack will update just like any other stack.

If you make a template for F6 that you think would benefit the community, send it over and I would be happy to help ship it for you.

So much more

There are so many more features to go over. There is just too much to list. Here are some notable updates.

  • Forms got a really great overhaul. There are a bunch of new fields and layouts to make them more powerful. As I said before, F6 forms are fully accessible.
  • Forms can now send as many different emails as you want, to as many email addresses as you want. Markdown support for the email template was added as well.
  • Columns can now have centered content!
  • All columns now match the height of their sibling columns out of the box.
  • Column ordering is now super simple
  • Markdown is now the text engine of choice!
  • Menus are very not opinionated at all. They can be easily styled to blend into your sites style.
  • The new Menu Builder is a great way of building your own custom menus.

FAQs

Upgrade Pricing

I wrote up a very thorough overview of the various costs for Foundation 6. You can read it hereā€¦ Foundation 6 Pricing

What about the addon packs?

Foundation 6 is all one stack now. You get everything that Foundation 1 had (and more) in one stack.

Will Foundation 6 override my Foundation 1 stacks?

Foundation 6 will install as a completely new stack set. Therefore, Foundation 1 & 6 will happily live inside RapidWeaver together.

How can I upgrade my existing F1 sites?

However, you cannot mix F6 and F1 stacks on the same site. If you want to upgrade your site to use F6, you will need to rebuild the website using Foundation 6.

How will this affect my existing websites?

Existing projects that use Foundation 1 will continue to function without issue. You can still use and maintain site built with F1 as you can today. Nothing will force you to upgrade the site to the new version.

Where are the docs?

Right now, the best place to learn Foundation 6 is through the live streams that I have done over the past 3 weeks. You can watch those in the tutorial tab on the Foundation product page or on my YouTube channel.

Make sure that you post questions on the new Foundation 6 space on the Weaverā€™s Space Community.

I have started recording shorter niche videos about each stack and core concept in F6. I plan on having the first batch of those posted asap.

Over the holidays, I will start working on a new version of foundationstacks.com. This will have the full documentation and demos about everything F6. I didnā€™t want to make you all wait 3 more months to get F6 in your hands just so that I could build this site.

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Donā€™t miss todayā€™s live stream!!!

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@joeworkman,
Donā€™t know if you intended to, but you have to login or sign up to read this link.

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Thanks. Fixed!

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Foundation 6 Open Office Hours

I will be holding open office for the remainder of the day in order to answer any questions that you may have about Foundation 6. Or just pop in and say hello! You can join me hereā€¦

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I had to jump off for the dayā€¦ I will be back online Friday and will do another open office.

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I just posted a special Black Friday event for users that have upgraded to Foundation 6.

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Greetings! Are there any examples yet of Foundation 6 websites made with RapidWeaver and stacks? Thanks!

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following

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Dumb question:
If Iā€™ve upgraded from old foundation (the first one) to 6.1, is it better to rebuild a site from scratch or can I just plop in the new foundation and try to manage it all?
Iā€™m recovering from a hard disc crash and my tech accidentally destroyed my backups going back to April so while I have the rapidweaver file I would have to go back and install every single stack based on each ā€˜missing stackā€™ error. Or I can just copy & paste into a fresh install.

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I do recommend that you start a new project using Foundation 6. You can copy your existing content over. However, you cannot use Foundation 1 stacks inside of Foundation 6. This would be a great opportunity to really fine tune your content and re-evaluate everything.

Sorry to here about your crash. That is always so frustrating. Having a fresh start can sometimes be a nice thing though.

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Any examples of sites made with 6 yet?

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That pricing is simply too rich for me, i have never understood the logic of charging longer term customers MORE for upgradesā€¦unless the price comes down iā€™ll be looking at other options. Sorry great product but with current AU exchange rates thats almost 150 bucks, which tbh is just plain ridiculous. Iā€™ve got pro audio upgrades that cost significantly less.

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Although I havenā€™t purchased the upgrade yet, I think the pricing model is more than fair.

The old product Foundation 1 is 5+ years old. The new product is a complete rewrite of the product. Itā€™s a new product, nothing in the old is even usable in the new. If it had a different name you might think differently.

Thatā€™s going to affect anything that you buy. The 79 USD upgrade price should equal about 114 AUD.

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As I have mentioned before, I used to create my websites using Apple iWeb and Adobe Muse. Both of those companies pulled the plug and orphaned their customers because they could not make a business case for continuing with the development necessary to accommodate current paradigms.

I personally feel reassured that the developers for these themes and stacks can charge enough to stay alive. If they can continue to make a business case for staying in business I hopefully wonā€™t have to start all over with a fourth website platform.

The only thing I would ask for in exchange is better training programs. Hour long streams of consciousness donā€™t really advance my knowledge. What I want is something like Lynda.Com with a retrievable syllabus.

All of these stacks are good ones. Some might be a little better but most are good enough to get what I need done. I will go with whichever developer can get me trained best. Having a million options that I canā€™t harvest doesnā€™t do me any good at all.

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@cabinetmaker Foundry provides excellent written and video tutorials. Itā€™s a very user-friendly platform. Check it out here:
https://foundry.elixirgraphics.com/documentation/

With time Iā€™m sure Foundation 6 will also have a very nice set of targeted videos.

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Tim @cabinetmaker,

The closest thing to Lynda .com in for RapidWeaver in general would have been RapidWeaver Classroom. Itā€™s still available and covers general RW stuff through RW8, but unfortunately doesnā€™t yet cover stacks 4 and a lot of the newer addons.

I donā€™t know if @ryanbsmith is planning to keep updating the tutorials or not.

Otherwise, you just have to wait on the developers.

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Also worth having a look on our RapidWeaver Academy - thereā€™s a couple of courses there that do a step-by-step building of a website. Weā€™ve had great reviews from a range of users.

It uses a different framework but many of the principles/ techniques can be applied in your framework of choice.

There are many more courses planned and Iā€™m always open to suggestions too.

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Thanks Doug.

I had already subscribed to RapidWeaver Classroom but to tell you truth forgot all about it.
It was something I did in my first days with RW when everything was much more of a blur than it is right now. I just watched his video about publishing websites and it was like watching Mr Rogers give you a tour of the saxophone factory. It was very calming, through and very well paced. Andā€¦retrievable.
I look forward now to seeing what RapidWeaver Academy has to offer.

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As a software company I can tell you: Longer means got more use out of itā€¦ the courtesy shown to recent buyers of software is a reflection of them not getting enough time with it yet so as to be worth it. This is prevalent in the software industryā€¦ Microsoft being a leaderā€¦ they are regular about re chargingā€¦ my sub version of windows 10 has reached maturity, if I want support, meaning updates for security included, I have to rebuy windows now, and Iā€™m on 10, you so dont own it, many software companies have adopted rental ware which is directly money for time coveredā€¦ software is licensed to you as well, again reflecting non ownership on the part of the buyerā€¦ intellectual property must be retainedā€¦ if you ā€œsellā€ code to someone it is theirā€™s to redistribute freelyā€¦ copyright infringementā€¦ so you have to retain rightsā€¦ the reason for upgrades and charging for them is the software engineers need to work, stay working, so they write, and must be paid, again, and again, and again, depending on lifespan of the software or engineers thereofā€¦ I have paid quite a few times for windowsā€¦ and at times in the past I paid repeatedly for photoshop, indesign, golive, wordā€¦ I hope this helps you understand why software is the way it is.