Foundation 6.4 has been released by the team over at Zurb, and while it’s packed with tweaks and improvements that you’d expect from any release, the big news is that the Flexbox-based grid is now the default layout tool.

XY Grid

The new grid is called the XY Grid, and it’s truly powerful thanks to the underlying Flexbox technology. In the XY grid you can control layouts both horizontally (x) and vertically (y) thanks to the super-amazing power of Flexbox. Foundation has been playing with Flexbox for a while, in fact it was one of the first frameworks to adopt Flexbox as a layout option. Adopting new technology in this way is one of the things that’s kept Foundation ahead of the pack. All we’ve been hearing about for months is CSS Grid for layout, but actually CSS Grid is still cooking with support not quite there yet—support for Flexbox is consistent across the board which makes Foundation 6.4 the way to layout websites. Of course, the old style grid is still there, for those people that need legacy support, but the XY Grid is so cool, you’ll want to stick with the new default.

ES2016

Foundation 6.4 also adopts EcmaScript 2016 standards, in practical terms the most up-to-date JavaScript there is. ES2016 moves us further towards OOP JS and that means far more efficient scripts, that run faster and enable better user experience. Again, there’s some backwards-compatibility options, so don’t panic if you’ve got client sites that you don’t want to update, or seriously backward browser requirements.

Prototyping

Foundation was built as production code. Despite this lots of people (seriously, lots) use Foundation for rapid prototyping—sometimes you just need to throw together a working prototype, take it to users, and gather their feedback. Unfortunately, it’s not always been clear which parts of Foundation were designed to enable rapid prototyping. The fallout from that being that occasionally, unwitting developers would push prototype-standard code out to a production environment. Sad gifs all round. Zurb are tackling that in Foundation 6.4 by giving us a whole heap of prototyping helpers and even a “prototype mode” to speed up prototyping. This smells like something that’s going to evolve in future!

Get Foundation 6.4

Foundation 6.4 looks like being one of the best updates yet: tons of performance improvements and a whole new way to layout sites thanks to the XY Grid. Foundation 6.4 is free to download from Zurb, and if you’re excited about getting up to speed on the XY Grid Zurb are running free webinars tomorrow (Thursday 29th June) and Friday (30th June)—make sure you sign up fast because there’s limited spacing.