Foundry 2? (And a question about Navbar Pro)

I’m training up a new worker bee to help me with client projects. Previously they’ve had zero web building skills, but a good eye for design. Credit to Rapidweaver: After a one-day training session with me and two days “playing” with things they are already able to take on a client project. Proving something those of us who have been at RW for years have forgotten: RW is really pretty good for total novices to get going with!

Anyway, back on topic. I’ve started them off and restricted them to Foundry, as I felt it was the best place to start with a framework. I/we have Foundry 1 and Potion pack, which for a newbie covers most things, but I’m thinking of throwing Foundry 2 into the mix. To be honest, if for nothing else than the new Navbar, which looks like a nicely customisable but simple to pickup navbar stack (I’m obsessed with menus!).

Anyone using Foundry 2? Curious to hear your views.

The first project the new person is working on is a single pager. She needs to build in a scrolling menu bar, so the links in the menu need to be able to work with anchors. Anyone know if this is poss with Navbar Pro?

Ta.

I am using Foundry 2 for all my projects now (https://einfach-gute-seiten.de). I would recommend it for one setting alone - you can select the font sizes for each breakpoint in the general settings. Of course the new stacks are great as well…

The v1 NavBar Pro can build a single page nav. If your protege is happy with it then I would say crack on.

Foundry2 has a become a large collection of stacks with a lot of overlap in functionality and the various navigation options are a good example of this. There is no doubt that Foundry is easy to use, but I would add that as long as there are not too many pages or content then it works. You do have to accept what is set in stone and lots of stuff can’t be modified such as when the navigation changes to mobile or what hand curated Font Awesome icons are available to use.

I would think starting them off with Source would be a far better option for many reasons, but in particular, they only need to learn how to use a handful of stacks. I say that having built more Foundry sites than I can remember but having to work on existing Foundry sites after using Source is not something I enjoy.

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Wow. Didn’t see that coming.

;-)

I’m only offering that advice with no commercial connection or influence whatsoever, and probably a unique experience of building identical Projects with both Foundry and Source, and also have converted several Foundry sites into Source. You only really get to appreciate the differences until you do this IMHO.

But go for it.

LOL. I’m just poking fun at your Source obsession, don’t take it personally.

Source is great, but not the right starting point for a total newbie in my opinion. Drag and drop, limited options and lots of things pre-defined are perfect in this instance, I believe.

Or maybe investing in the Source Training Academy would be a wise, instead of buying Foundry 2. Then you don’t have to waste time training your Steve clone.

What business would invest in a new system that didn’t have a training course?

Directing an employee to watch a bunch YouTube videos is far from ideal.

I’m happy with how I’m training my new staffer and the choices I’ve made for their tools, so I’ll make you a deal: You stop banging on about Source on this thread and I’ll stop banging on about PHPj Form on that other thread? Deal?

Ha. I don’t mind you banging on about PHPbuggers as it never made much sense to me.

How about I call it PHPSource? Does that help? ;-)

I’d say Foundry 2 is in line with Foundry 1 - works well and looks nice out of the box, but you may bump into limitations and there’s not an appetite to improve / change them.

Nav BarPro is a good example. You can’t (currently anyway) have child items in the regular menu.

So, while I like using it, I’m hesitant to use it for client work sometimes unless I know I’ll have heavy design control and can work around any limitations.

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Thanks for the comments. I’ve gone ahead and got it, to try out mostly. For a newbie I think being restricted is no bad thing, so we’ll see how it goes.

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