There are so many amazing things happening with Foundation right now and we're excited to share it all. Hot on the heels of Foundation for Apps, we released an amazing update for Foundation for Sites. This release, v5.5, brings some great updates and lots key fixes. On top of that, the community stepped up with some well-written pull requests that allowed us to really strengthen this release.
The Foundation Community Crushes It!
Previously we talked about how the Foundation community is crushing it. The big challenge: dropdowns that weren't behaving like they were supposed to, breaking out of the page boundaries. Five different people submitted their versions of a fix for this hard issue. After weeks of going through multiple iterations with the different attempts, a hero emerged: Corey Snyder, who submitted a pull request with a great solution. We tested it in many different browsers and devices, and found it's a huge improvement and now dropdowns stay in the viewport much better. A big thanks to Corey!
This is what we love about our community! On top of this huge win came many other fixes If you're into all the details, see them here.
- Abide got some some love and now validations work better.
- Split buttons can now support 2 different events
- And Accordions no longer tied to
ddanddtelements. - Dropdowns now automatically close when a link is clicked
…and a bunch of other great improvements.
A Unified Front for a Common Problem
The new Foundation for Apps and Sites really compliment each other. That's why we are making Foundation a family of tools for responsive design. Building a responsive web app with Foundation for Apps? You'll need a sweet marketing site for smooth on-boarding and dialed in SEO. Because of this, we will continue improving Foundation with your help. All of us will need to make responsive sites for years to come, and Foundation will continue to evolve to solve current and new problems.
Given the ever increasing mobile search traffic it's crazy that only 18.7% of the top 100 sites are responsive! That's a huge opportunity for growth and we'll continue to need the right tools to feed this revolution. Some of the industries that have the largest growth potential are news providers, banking, and academic institutions. Perhaps the largest sector for growth opportunity is in E-commerce. According to an article by Inc.com going responsive increases average conversion 10.9%.
Looking Toward the Future
Since Foundation for Sites (5.0) was released Nov 22, 2013, there have been 2895 commits! We're stoked to have such awesome community support and it encourages us to push the limits of what this framework can be. As the 5.5 release makes Foundation for Sites a more solid codebase we can look toward the next version of Foundation. There's a huge community 'wishlist' on GitHub that we're watching watching and commenting on. Additionally we can talk about just a few items on our roadmap.
- The entire family on one CLI — Wouldn't it be rad if you could whip up a Site, App, or Email project with one simple command? It would save setup time and resources. We also think less dependencies would be nice.
- Re-factor the Foundation JavaScript — A lot of the remaining issues revolve around how the Foundation JS components work with each other and how they work in a single-page-app. Taking a queue from Foundation for Apps, we'll make the JS API uniform across all components. This means each component uses the same code to open, close, and toggle.
- Get less specific — Foundation is great for staying out of your way when you're ready to style your site. It can be better. Certain components will get a thorough cleaning to make the selectors less specific.
These are just a few of the great improvements to come with the next Foundation for Sites.
As we move forward with Foundation for Sites, we will continue to bug-fix and improve the existing components. We learned a lot out of building Foundation for Apps from the ground up and came up ways to make Foundation easier to use and learn, how to make better UI plugins, and how to make the different versions of Foundation to act, well, more like a family. As the needs of our community continue to evolve, so will the tools we need to create superior responsive sites. The future of Foundation is very exciting!