Begin Your Apprenticeship
If you're new to Foundry this is where it all begins. If you're veteran blacksmith this is where you'll return time and again to reference how all of the tools in Foundry work.
While Foundry is easy to use there are a lot of different tools included. And with each tools comes a wide variety of options and settings to help you customize your site. We've documented all of those settings for you.
Getting Started
We've created a simple guide to get you going. Whether you're a new user or returning, this is a great place to begin.
We've broken things down into multiple sections. We start by showing you how to install Foundry. After that we look at the basics of how Foundry works in a Quick Start tutorial. And finally we build out a simple site from scratch.
Community
While we've done our best to document everything in Foundry, sometimes you just need a helping hand.
Our Elixir support forum is a great place to connect with us as well as other Foundry users. Share tips and tricks, look for help using Foundry's tools, or seek the sage advice of veteran users in building your site.
Core Concepts
We feel like everyone should be able to design a website of their own and have fun while doing it. Foundry makes the task of building a website from the ground up just that — easy and fun.
Foundry allows you to take our pre-built, customizable, modular components and assemble them to create any sort of site design you can think up.
With drag-and-drop ease you can build powerful, responsive sites that your visitors and clients are sure to love. Once you're comfortable with the Foundry tools you'll find that they each have powerful settings and options to customize your designs to your liking.
Control Center
Foundry has a main Control Center that you will add to the very top each of your site's pages. It acts as the nerve center of your site.
This tool controls the basic, page-wide settings as well as provides the underlying CSS and javascript that will power your creations. It offers a great deal of control for you in determining how your site will look and function. It is the fire in Foundry’s forge.
Foundry Tools
While the main Control Center powers your pages, the real fun begins when you start adding other Foundry tools to your page. They consist of everything from the basics like Paragraph and Header to Navigation, Buttons, Forms and so much more!
On the left-hand side of this page you’ll find some categories. In each will be a list of related Foundry tools. Click on any one of them to learn more — see what the tool does, how to use it, what options it has built-in to it, and more.
We also include examples of those tools in action on their individual pages so you can get an idea of what each offers.
We hope you'll find this documentation site a useful tool as well for referencing when building your sites.
Requirements & Compatibility
We've worked diligently to make sure that Foundry v3 will work in several different environments. Foundry v3 will work with both RapidWeaver and Stacks in several configurations:
- RapidWeaver 8 or Classic, and the Stacks v4+ plugin (Stack v5 recommended)
Browser Support
Foundry supports the latest, stable releases of major browsers and platforms.
Alloy Compatibility
If you're going to be using Alloy with Foundry 3 be sure to add the Alloy 'F3 Shim' tool to the page just below the Alloy Control Center. This F3 Shim tool is included in the most recent versions of Alloy. This F3 Shim adds a bit of necessary CSS to the page to help with compatibility.
Legacy Documentation
Still need to look up some information for Legacy Foundry v2? No problem. We've created a specific Legacy Documentation site for this exact purpose!
Visual Learner
We know not everyone learns the same. We provide both the written documentation as well as many different tutorial videos.
These documentation pages include their own individual tutorial videos, but we also have a Getting Started page that includes several videos that walk you through doing specific tasks, as well as building your first site.