Anyone ever try v2? I always meant to give it a go, but never got round to it.
Same here, looked interesting but went for foundation instead.
It’s built in search stack looks very handy.
Are all frameworks much of a muchness or do any have genuine advantages over each other I wonder?
Looks well thought out and puts Foundation and Foundry to shame with what looks like good Flexbox alignment which is carried over into the Nav Bar, also has an inline SVG image stack, and good form support with reCaptcha.
Very difficult to say how it will be to use without trying it out. For those who want to buy a Framework then it ticks a lot of boxes that are left unticked elsewhere.
It costs the same for 12 months as Blocs3 however.
Just watched a bunch of the videos, fair play to Lucas, he’s made a load of them.
Looks really nice.
Most definitely not much of a muchness. There is a lot that separates them IMO. I have Foundation and Foundry. I’m not the best to comment on either as I don’t use any of the stacks that comes with them, I use mostly BWD with the gaps being plugged by Stacks4Stacks and Doobx. Plus most of Instacks stuff for the more specialist jobs.
So really I only use the themes, style sheets, font managers and nav stacks that ship with the frameworks.
Foundry: My day o day framwork, purely cus it’s faster in preview and I like the Mega Menu stack. No other reason. The image stacks that ship with it are useless to me as I don’t build sites in 2009 but 2019 so I warehouse them. Foundry stacks don’t support warehouse’d images, at all. Nuts. The dev is a bit a of a handful too if you have your own mind and want to do things your way. There is a running joke comment in some circles: “That is not a feature of the stack”. Go read his forum to learn why. I’ve also found lots of third party stacks don’t play well with Foundry.
Foundation: Good, but getting old and I find it very slow in preview. But it’s rock solid otherwise. Joe is a top bloke. Ego so big at times not even Superman couldn’t leap over it, but he possesses the ability to laugh at himself, so it’s all good. Incidentally, my ego would eat his for breakfast, so I can’t really talk!
Hope that helps. All only my opinion.
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I’m pretty sure it will continue to work after that 12 months so that’s not strictly accurate ;-)
Support is 12 months for the first $99 then $69 per year after that to continue support whereas Blocs3 is not support limited to 12 months - it’s a one off purchase. I really think you need the support to get updated stacks. Think back on all of the Foundation updates and Foundry get regular bug fixing updates too.
I’m not saying the pricing model is wrong or expensive, but it is a big factor to some to consider. RapidWeaver is getting to be an expensive system. No doubt many will buy Foundation, Foundry, UIkit 2 and then get Foundation 2 as well.
Not disputing that, it’s just from your comment it could be construed that it stops working after 12 months, which it doesn’t, or at least I don’t think it does.
Although, interesting point about no updates after a year… Is that the case? Within RW and it’s built in updater, is that even possible? Maybe it doesn’t use the RW updater and updates are sent out directly?
I read it as the dev will offer no support on the product after 12 months, not that you won’t get updates. So you’ve raised an interesting point, hopefully the dev will clarify.
I’m tempted just to give it a whirl, and at the very least do a comparison with the other frameworks. It would take something special to move me away from my usual arsenal of stacks for content, but even if I just used it for the theme, style sheet, font manager and menus it’d be worth it. For me it’s just a case of how fast is it in preview: If it can preview fast it’s a winner, if not, it’s none-starter. I think that’s the same for most users like us nowadays, who use RW for client work.
If I implied that it stopped working, then I certainly didn’t mean that. The purchase page for UIKit is pretty clear and it says:
“After one year of the purchase you can continue using the product you purchased. However, you will not be able to access new content and feature releases, updates and support. Please purchase the Update to have full access to UIkit again.”
Anyway, just buy it and let us know.
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So it cannot be on the updater then. It has to be manually distributed updates.
Hi guys, just wished to chime in and say hello.
Just signed into this forum and I’m impressed with how popular it became, nice!
Thanks @steveb for opening this thread.
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Hello Lucas! Great that you’ve joined here, we chatted a few times back at the launch of v1 (might have been 2), but I never got around to making the purchase. More recently, I thought you’d moved on from RW, good to see that wasn’t the case.
Anyway, I’ve a ton of questions…
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Container: Is there a manual way to set the max-width per-container, not globally? And can margin/padding be applied to the containers manually and for different breakpoints?
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And on the subject of breakpoints: can they be adjusted manually?
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The biggie for me: Preview speed. Have you any videos demonstrating the speed of preview/simulator with a reasonably large/complex page? I can see the speed in the videos you’ve made for the stacks, but these pages are very small with minimal content.
That’ll do for now, I’ve plenty more where they came from ;-)
Hey Steve
Yep I remember chatting with you a long time ago. I’m still developing for RW but also did some stuff for Blocs, add to that my other many projects and at some point I had too much at my plate.
To your questions:
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Container: there’s a way of setting the max-width for all containers in your page, but there’s no setting to adding margin or padding related to breakpoints.
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Breakpoints cannot be adjusted manually, except for the Image and the supported srcset option.
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For the speed question, check the more elaborated pages like the Store project, which is full of images too. Talking about images, the Image component helps improving page speeds as it will load images as they enter the viewport. We may also set a load target class, so the image will load related to a specific element.
Here’s a link to the Store project: https://uikitstacks.com/projects/store/
Thanks for that.
When I ask about speed, I mean when jumping between edit and preview, not the page load speeds once published.
For more complex, even just a bit complex, RW grinds so badly when flicking between edit/preview, so curious how v3 measures up? For me, this is one of the first considerations as to which framework to use.
Oh, and contain width, can it be set per container? On a site I’m building at the moment contain widths range from 500 to 1200px.
Oh that speed…
I worked a lot on the preview speed and tested ways of loading resources, in particular the framework’s styles and my own related to the Customizer (the main stack where the styles reside).
In my view the preview speed is strictly related to how these resources are loaded, and what method is used.
In my tests I saw a sensible decrease in speed when working with scss files (pages take longer to preview), than using normal css stylesheets. My guess is that the Stacks engine has to compile the scss files before previewing, therefore the longer time to preview.
Note that a normal css divided in various scss files can result in a rather large amount of unique files, don’t know in Bootstrap but in UIkit alone these are almost 60.
Now, I don’t want to diminish the work of other developers, as I know that some did opted for the scss solution. Just that in my case and after many tests, working with scss files makes the preview a bit slower.
About Container width: the Container has four options for max-speed and one option of expand. When using the latest you can change the max-speed at the Customizer.
Container widths are explained here: https://uikitstacks.com/documentation/container/
Tests for the Container are here: https://uikitstacks.com/projects/tests/container/
Good enough, I’ll try to get it bought soon and give folk a real-world usage report.
Thanks for the replies.
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Actually, sorry @Lucas one more question…
I’m just watching some of the videos again, for me, the menu control is crucial, how is the point at which things switch from the full menu to the offcanvas menu controlled?
In the videos there is a tab in the settings for “Responsive” but it’s collapsed so I can’t see the settings.
One of the big drawbacks with the Foundry menus is you have no control over breakpoints, which means your menu is also a compromise. Is the breakpoint manually set for yours?
In UIkit we have specific breakpoints, like in any other framework. These cannot be edited or customizable.
Particularly in regarding the Navbar and Offcanvas both follow the breakpoints of the Visibility component, more details at the docs.
Bollox. Unfortunately, that’s a deal breaker for me. Foundation lets you choose all break points, as does almost all of Tavs stacks (almost a framework in their own right). Foundry doesn’t and it’s a big complaint you hear a lot about.
I appreciate from a dev’s POV it might be the best way forward and may be tied in to the framework their framework is based on, like UIkit, Bootstrap etc, but as the user of these frameworks, I insist on having the control of major things like breakpoints as there are so many instances where I need a menu to go mobile at a certain width, or a grid to stack at a certain width, etc.
I do respect your POV though, and hope UIkit3 is successful for you, it’s just sadly not for me.
No worries, if I ever implement these in a future update I’ll let you know.
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Yes, v2 is great! v3 - I took a look at the videos and it seems to be greater and much easier. I’m no web developer and not able to write any code and RW with uikit is perfect for me. I will buy the upgrade in the near future. my website www.powershootings.de runs on v2.
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