In the past decade, front end development has changed a lot. In the old days, you would hand-roll, hack, test. It was a labor-intensive coding project. Lately, a suite of tools has emerged that promise many benefits to the developer workflow including grunt, foundation, sass, pre-processors, emmet, docker, composer, bower…
The tools are fine in their own right, but the problem with them is that they aren’t really durable. Using woodworking as an analogy, the tools last longer than the products that you build.
I was recently visiting a site for a foundation outline theme that seemed promising and found its discontinuation sidenote.
http://themes.required.ch/news/required-foundation-project-discontinued/
And I quote:
We switched to _s and a custom grid system and therefore don’t use Zurb Foundation anymore. The docs will stay available until 2015, feel free to fork the project on Github.
It’s been quite the journey and we learned a lot maintaining the required+ Foundation theme and it’s assets. We are grateful for all the people helping and using required+ Foundation as their WordPress base theme. Instead of releasing a version that we don’t use internally, we finally decided to discontinue required+ Foundation. This decision wasn’t easy and we tried to free some time for the project, but had to realise that it’s best to discontinue the project instead of letting you wait in limbo any longer.
Thanks again for the support and understanding
– Silvan & the required+ team
I totally agree with you that the durability of front-end tools and frameworks are very questionable at best. Yet I believe that there are additional factors to take into account:
* Front-end development changes faster than ever before, which in the end might give us a good set of best practices that are way easier to use
* The beauty of open-source is that you can fork it and change it according to your needs if you wish so
Btw. the required+ Foundation theme still works fine with WP. Sadly the way ZURB was pushing Foundation forward wasn’t suitable for our projects anymore.