Foundry 3 has been completely re-engineered from the ground up. Every tool has been re-written from scratch. These changes bring more power and speed to both Foundry and your sites, while maintaining drag-and-drop ease. Because of this, Foundry 3 is not backwards compatible with Foundry 2.
But don't fret just yet! Foundry 2 and Foundry 3 safely co-exist in your Stacks library with no problem. This means you can use the latest and greatest Foundry 3 for building new, modern sites, or retooling old ones from the ground up, while still maintaining existing sites with Foundry 2.
Foundry is aimed at helping you build your site from the ground up. To do this it uses a set of modular tools, combined with its own blank theme. That theme contains some of the necessary code for the overall framework. Because of this Foundry will not work properly within themes other than the one that comes with your Foundry purchase. In fact we even alert you in Preview Mode if you're using the incorrect theme.
To use Foundry you'll need a couple of prerequisite pieces of software. At the time of writing this Foundry 3 can be used within RapidWeaver 8 and RapidWeaver Classic. In both of these you will also need to own a copy of the Stacks plugin for RapidWeaver, which is sold by YourHead Software.
You’re seeing the hidden tools in your library. Many Foundry tools are composed of a parent item and several child items nested within them. These child items are set to be hidden by default because they’re not directly usable by you outside of their parent tool.
Seeing these red warning icons indicates that you have the Show Hidden Stacks feature turned on for some reason in your Stacks Library settings (see below). Turn that feature off and you’ll be good to go. There is really no reason, outside of being a developer, that you’d need that feature turned on.
No. Foundry 2 and Foundry 3 are completely different under the hood and are based around vastly different versions of Bootstrap. Each Foundry version's tools are not cross compatible with one another. This includes not just Foundry 2's base set of tools, but also the Potion and Thunder Packs as well.
As a result of this we've included a lot of the functionality from Foundry 2's Potion and Thunder addon packs into Foundry 3's suite of tools.
You can, without a doubt, use other 3rd-party Stacks addons within Foundry. I work to make sure most other tools outside of Foundry will function inside Foundry. With so many third-party addons out there though, there’s no way for me to possibly know, or list them all. If you have a question about a specific tool, be sure to post your question over on the Elixir Support Forum.
Foundry 3 has switched over to Bootstrap v5, the latest and most up to date version. In doing so we had to adapt everything to their new code structure. Additionally we wanted to make things more streamlined, more modular, and more integrated throughout all of the tools. These new features, and approaches, couldn't be shoehorned into the existing Foundry code without adding bloat over complicating how things work.
This also gave us the headroom to do much more with Foundry, now and in the future, as well as allowed us to speed things up throughout.
The oldest version you'll want to be using at this time is PHP v7.4. PHP v8 is the newest and most up to date. All Foundry tools that use PHP are compatible with PHP v8.
Definitely. Make sure you've updated to the latest version of Alloy. When you do so you'll get a new Alloy tool labeled F3 Shim if you don't already have it. You'll need to be sure to add the Alloy 'F3 Shim' tool to the page just below the Alloy Control Center on your page. This F3 Shim adds a bit of necessary CSS to the page to help with compatibility.
If you have lost your purchased items somehow, either through some sort of computer problems, or just an accident, fret not you can retrieve them all on your own.
Simply go to our documentation page and click the Retrieve Past Orders button at the bottom left of the page. A form will popup when you click that link that allows you to supply it with the necessary information needed to retrieve your download links.
If you do not get results from the retrieval form it may be likely that you used a different email address to purchase Foundry than the one you’re entering. Give the form another try with any alternate email addresses you may have used in the past.
No. Blacksmith is completely optional and included in Foundry 3 for the adventurous. Foundry is still based around using modular tools to build your site from the ground up. Nothing there has changed whatsoever. We've simply added more modularity and options to Foundry to make site building more versatile. And one of those added optional tools is Blacksmith.
It is likely that you're using Toolbox's Acceleration mode. This feature helps speed up the Edit Mode experience in Stacks and eliminate some of the lag in Edit Mode. It does this by offloading some of the processing to your video card's memory. If your video card's memory fills up you will often get this flipped content. Simplest solutions are to either turn Acceleration off and then back on again in Toolbox, or just go without the optional Acceleration feature.
In an effort to cut out the extra cruft added by Stacks within each of the tools under the hood, we made all of the Foundry tools inline elements. This helps by removing the multiple extra <div>
wrappers around each tool's contents, making for more streamlined, better code. As a result, by making each Foundry tool an inline item, the Stacks plugin removes those extra controls.
That's ok though, because Foundry is now more modular. We've created tools targeting what those controls do. An example would be the Spacing tool. Instead of every single tool having Padding and Margin controls, we've split it out so that you're only adding that code precisely where it is needed. This modularity streamlines things quite a lot. And the Spacing tool does far more than the built-in padding and margins could have ever done.
Foundry's Paragraph tool is Markdown-based, so you'll be using Markdown style links to accomplish this task. We've created a short quick tip tutorial video to show the various options that Paragraph provides for creating these links.
No need to worry. We've kept the Foundry 2 documentation, as well as its tutorial videos, available on its own special sub-domain. You can browse the documentation and view the video tutorials at the site below:
Get the help that you need. The Elixir Community forum is a great place to connect with other Foundry user. Share tips and tricks, look for help using Foundry's many tools, or seek the sage advice of other users when building your sites.