Why do you love Foundation?

[joeworkman]

What are your favorite features and/or benefits of Foundation?

I have gotten to meet a lot of Foundation users this year. It's been awesome to see the vast difference in the types of users that Foundation has. It's used by beginner users because of the easy to use components that don't require you to learn the ins and outs of CSS and JS. But there are also very experienced developers that value the Sass mixins to generate their own custom components. Obviously, there are a ton of users in between.

The discussions here will definitely help shape future plans. Let's keep feature requests out of this discussion for now. Just tell us what you love about Foundation.

[JeremyCaney]

Our work doesn't always build off of a front-end web framework. When we do, however, we're typically choosing between Bootstrap and Foundation. And given that choice, I strongly prefer Foundation for following reasons:

1. The markup tends to be dramatically simpler and more semantic, with less overhead to accommodate potential corner cases.
2. The classes are more modular, which requires extra care when updating, but simplifies standardizing styles across components.
3. The styles look nice out-of-the-box, but are less prescriptive, and thus easier to restyle without fighting against the defaults.

When we first adopted Foundation, another major factor was the first-class use of SASS and the rich set of variables, mixins, &c. for extending both the styles as well as the framework. We appreciated that Foundation could integrate tightly with our site-specific styles. Since then, Bootstrap has caught up on that front, and so it doesn't remain quite as strong of a differentiator.

Still, Foundation remains more developer friendly, and especially in terms of long-term maintenance of highly customized designs.

[joeworkman]

Thank you Jeremy

[illiterati]

• It's super easy to extend and customize, without breaking.
• The class syntax is intuitive, and generally consistent.
• It's well-documented (although, there's a bit of catching up to do there.)
• It's much more robust than Bootstrap, which I was an extensive user of before discovering Foundation.
• The various containers are all very useful, and easy to make your own while still being "Foundation."

[illiterati]

I should add, I was an extensive user of Foundation for Emails for a long time too, I liked that I could reuse a lot of my web thinking for pain-in-the-butt emails. :) Would love to see that make a comeback.

[joeworkman]

Yes. I will be giving Emails some love next year. I want to make progress on Sites first.

[illiterati]

Nice! I'd be happy to contribute in whatever meager way I could.

[ediejohnny]

Well, I love:

• the clean default design;
• the easy way to setup everything;
• the way it works with classes in the flex grid;

What I have difficult:

• It's difficult to work with PHP, there's a lot of workarounds we have to do to work with it in the backend;
• It's difficult to have an MVC project and their .htaccess file. We have to modify the gulp file to work with this;
• Please, we'd love to install Foundation with the newest NodeJS without thousands of "deprecated" dependencies and error among the first (and clean) installation;
• We need some facilities when we have to build backend projects; seems like Foundation was built only to make static pages, but this don't match the actual world needs;

[joeworkman]

Feel free to start new discussions about your issues. I use F6 with PHP and have not ran into any issues myself.
Foundation 6.7 supports node 14.

[illiterati]

I do a lot of work in Craft CMS, and the Foundation workflow is very nearly perfect for creating Craft templates. You can reuse your panini templates as Craft templates, just swapping in Craft field attributes.

[phpfui]

Any PHP users out there should check out my OO PHP library to wrap Foundation. You can do all the UI work on the back end, and basically not have to deal with HTML or changes between versions of Foundation. I originally wrote it for Foundation 4, then ported to 5 and finally to 6. But I was mostly able to reuse the same objects with the same behavior, but they would generate the latest Foundation compliant HTML. I also plan to support the current V6 concepts in V7, even if those concepts are no longer supported in V7 (ditto for V8). So when V7 is released, you simply update with composer, then start adding in the new V7 stuff where you want.

I also wrote a viciously fast DocBlock documentation generator. You can see all your code live, fully hyperlinked, with source and git history for your project. And it is all in Foundation, so runs great on your phone.

And the other great thing about using an OO approach to writing HTML, is your pages validate 100% with no effort. Really nice to see no errors or warning on your site.

Check it out at PHPFUI/InstaDoc

[luke-robinson]

I've been using Foundation since version 2.0 was released. What I love about Foundation v2-v5:

• mobile-first approach
• easy CSS class names and helpers
• plug-n-play components
• solid documentation and examples

Lately, starting with Foundation 6, the framework has become a real bear to wrestle. A few pain points include:

• Installation is a nightmare (packet managers, CLI, Gulp config files, version control, etc.)
• So many dependancies (Sassy helpers, linters, Browser Stack, Webpack etc.)
• So many Node modules (I count over 100)
• Git

I'm just a guy trying his best to make the Web fast and beautiful. I shouldn't need to enroll at Zurb University just to launch a project.

[joeworkman]

Thanks Luke

[luke-robinson]

@joeworkman Will F7 make life better? Today, I have a meeting at 3 p.m. EST, and the agenda is whether we upgrade to F6, switch to Bootstrap 5, or roll our own with Bulma CSS.

[joeworkman]

F7 will definitely make life better. 😄

[ThatcherDesign]

I was the designer that didn't want to learn to code. But, I got frustrated that my designs didn't really make it into the code. I visited the Bootstrap 2 home page and the page design was broken. I visited the Foundation 3 home page that worked. Decision made. I love that I can style Foundation without having to un-style it first. And Block Grid is a super-power.

[benthien]

I have been using foundation since version 5. I think it strikes a good balance between ease of use and the ability to customize. I use some php files primarily to validate contact forms. I haven't had any trouble incorporating them, but there could be some smalI changes that would make it easier. I very much like the panini an sass capabilities incorporated in the Zurb template. I agree that there are sometimes node dependency issues, but I still find it very useful. I am happy that foundation development is continuing.

[kebalz]

I love Foundation because of its build-tools. The Panini and YAML integration is amazing.
But just recently discovered that the use of Yarn is much more faster than the use of Foundation-CLI when initiating the build-tools. And I kind of agree with Luke up there in regard to its package installation especially via NPM. I prefer installing it with Yarn nowadays.
Looking forward to the appearance of F7 soon.

[amygilbert]

I use Foundation-sites 6.7.4 with Foundation-cli 2.2.6 on Ubuntu 18.04 (WSL) and I think it's the best way to develop a website I've seen. I looked into bootstrap when I was deciding what framework to use back in 2018 and I found it to be much harder to work with and required a lot more html markup (i.e. classes) plus it didn't have this prepackaged cli. You'd have to put it together yourself with all the components and I just didn't know how to do that.

I like that Foundation is nearly plain vanilla and lets you customize easily, especially with sass and the settings file.

I like that when I'm ready to publish, I compile and all the code gets minified and concatenated so it loads fast and is obfuscated against prying eyes.

I like that I can still support IE11 as we do business with large institutions who are notorious for being slow to modernize due to legacy web apps built specifically for IE.

But the best thing about Foundation (both -sites and -cli) is the fantastic volunteer developers (do you still call yourselves Yetinauts?) who have kept it alive. Squashing bugs and even throwing in some enhancements. I know there aren't many of you. Thank you so much for all of your hard work!

[phpfui]

The thing that drew me to Foundation was the cutting edge approach to everything. Back on V4 (I think), I saw that Foundation was using SASS, which was much better than LESS (remember that?) that Bootstrap was using at the time. Also the mobile first philosophy seemed right. Plus it just seemed to work better than Bootstrap, which still seems much less fluid and continues to have break point issues.

The choice was clear for anyone who appreciated good code. Foundation is much cleaner than Bootstrap, and is still as good as any other library I have seen since. They all learned and stole from Foundation! And the direction for V7 and V8 is spot on. Components are the way to go. Modular everything.