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Welcome to the first issue!

What's inside:

  • Roadmap for Foundation for Sites 6
  • Next release for Foundation for Sites 5
  • Foundation for Emails 2 progress
  • Foundation for Apps 2 plan

It’s going to be a big year for Foundation! It’s only been three months since we launched Foundation for Sites 6, but the team is moving at a great pace with the help of our awesome community. Let’s recap what’s been happening with the frameworks over the past month, and talk about where we’re headed.

Foundation for Sites

Last month we released version 6.1.2 of Foundation for Sites, which includes over 150 commits with many important bug fixes. We also updated the foundation-rails gem to work with Foundation 6—version 6.1.1 was the first version to be released.

For February, we’ve got our sights set on version 6.2, which will introduce a lot of awesome features that push our codebase forward. The highlights include:

Flexbox modes: Currently our components use a mix of floats, table layouts, and other CSS trickery to get layouts looking right. Y’know, the usual stuff you need in CSS. But now there’s a better way! For developers that can afford to drop IE9 and Android 2, we’re introducing an optional flexbox mode, which converts several key components—such as menu, button groups, input groups, and media object—to use flexbox.

More native control styles: We’re adding new CSS for <input type=”range”>, <progress>, and <meter>. These will all be opt-in components because, like flexbox, the older browser support can be shaky. But if you’re looking to push your codebase forward, Foundation is there to help you!

Flexible color palettes: The Foundation color palette includes primary, secondary, success, warning, and alert. In the Sass version of Foundation 6.2, you’ll be able to add or remove colors from the palette, which will also modify the CSS classes output to match.

Along with the launch of Foundation 6.2, we’ll also be releasing an update to the ZURB Template. The new template uses Gulp 4, which allows us to more elegantly fix a few repeated issues developers had been having with the build process. Configuring your project will also be easier, as the configuration settings have been moved out of the Gulpfile, and into an external YAML file. You can view the open pull request on GitHub to see the changes for yourself. We’re also collecting feedback on the template—if you have ideas for how it could be improved, let us know!

What about Foundation 5? We have about 40 open issues for Foundation 5. This month, we’ll be tearing through that list so we can release version 5.5.4 in March.

Foundation for Emails

Version 2.0 of Foundation for Emails—previously known as Ink—will be released in March. Last December we published an announcement blog post detailing the new big features for the next version of our responsive email frameworks. Last month, we did a follow-up post breaking down more of the features of the new Foundation for Emails. We’re particularly excited about Inky, a new templating language that allows you to write HTML emails without tables. Although it’s not at 1.0 yet, Inky is already open source! You can find it on GitHub. And stay tuned in the coming weeks, as we’ll be publishing a series of Release Candidates on GitHub, so you’ll be able to help us battle-test Foundation for Emails ahead of its launch.

Foundation for Apps

Last year we spent a lot of time building things with Foundation for Apps, which gave us a lot of insight into the needs behind responsive web apps. We’re pouring all of that knowledge into the next major version of Foundation for Apps, which will be released later this year.

We’ll have more to say about the technical changes later, but for now, we’re excited to formally announce that Foundation for Apps 2.0 will be written in Angular 2, which entered beta at the end of last year. Along with a new set of Angular 2 components, we’ll be iterating on the grid structure, Front Router, the starter templates, and more.
Hint: Expect to see more integration with Foundation for Sites components!

How Can You Contribute?

Our community has been doing some fantastic work. Here are some of the codebase improvements we’ve gotten through pull requests:

If you’re interested in contributing, check out the Help Wanted tag on the Foundation for Sites repo. We also have an open pull request for version 6.2, which has an overview of our goals for the next minor version of the framework. Feel free to leave feedback or contribute!