Zurb Foundation - Grid System

Zurb Foundation is a responsive front end framework that helps us to develop beautiful responsive websites that work on all devices effortlessly. It is a similar framework as Twitter BooStrap Framework to some extent.

The powerful and most beneficial part of the Foundation Framework is its Responsive Grid System.

More on Foundation Grid System

In order to understand the Grid System, Imagine any web page as an excel sheet with 12 columns in it and with multiple rows as below.

Each cell can be merged with the adjacent cells above or below so that blocks can be formed for the web page. Below is an example for such merged cells into blocks formed page layout. The blocks can be formed in n different ways. Imagine a web page with such blocks and it can be easily created with piece of code in Zurb Foundation.

I have created a sample web layout with the help of Foundation Framework that displays as below.

Below is the major component of Foundation code that has driven into the above layout. The code is mostly self understandable. The class "row" defines each row of the above block and any number of "div" from 1 to 12 can be defined in each row based on the layout need, with the help of the class "column". The large-6, large-12 etc defines how each row needs to be split into.

 <div class="row">
        <div class="large-6 column callout"></div>
        <div class="large-6 column callout"></div>
    </div>
    <div class="row">
        <div class="large-12 column callout"></div>
    </div>
    <div class="row">
        <div class="large-10 column callout"></div>
        <div class="large-2 column callout"></div>
    </div>
    <div class="row">
         <div class="large-6 column callout"></div>
         <div class="large-6 column callout"></div>
    </div>
</div>

In order to understand better, I have attached the code to this article.

Download code here

Please remember that Foundation is a responsive web framework. Take a look on the attached code in multiple devices or alter the browser size in your computer and see that the blocks stack up on one another on small browsers so that the content is visible and sized up completely and the responsiveness is achieved.

Read this before kick·off Sass

What is Sass?

Sass can be claimed as a most powerful CSS Extension language. It adds abundance of nice features to CSS, and helps the developers to build better stylesheets.

Sass is a CSS Preprocessor, How?

The developer writes Sass code in a .sass or .scss file and the Sass Preprocessor converts it to CSS format, that is .css file so that the browser understands the code and renders the page. The .scss format is the widely used one, because of its close to CSS syntax.

The advantage of Sass over css is that, it eradicates the monotonous code style of CSS and craft CSS easily.

How to install Sass on Windows?

Sass is a package provided by the programming language Ruby as one of its dependencies. All the packages of Ruby are called as Gems. Sass is one such Gem. To start with we need to install Ruby first on our machine.

Download and install the proper version of Ruby Installer that suits your computer from the below link.

http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/

Please note that for a 64 bit Windows operating system, the below link works charm.

https://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller2/releases/download/rubyinstaller-2.5.0-2/rubyinstaller-2.5.0-2-x64.exe

 

Start using Sass

 

In your computer create a dummy folder to test, with couple of subfolders named, CSS and SCSS, and a .scss test file in the scss folder as below.

 

Now you can watch your .scss test file for any changes and tell the preprocessor to convert to .css file using an inbuilt watch program. 

In order to do this go to the Dummy folder in the command prompt and run the below command.

sass --watch scss:css

Hereupon when you do any change in your .scss file, the watcher detects the change and compile it into a .css file. Try adding code to .scss file, save and check for the compilation happening automatically.