But there's still more to love.
Foundation 5 has been in the wild for about two months now, just enjoying its life as the most advanced responsive front-end framework in the world, you know, and we've had a lot of great feedback from the community in that time. The community hasn't just been giving feedback — they've also helped us close down issues. We also went in and cleared a few bugs as well.
We've also been busy building some new sites on Foundation 5, including the retrofit of our Design Apps. We released 5.0.1, 5.0.2 and 5.0.3 so far. But we've made a concentrated push for some new awesome things in time for 5.1! So let's get to it.
Sleeker, Slimmer
Foundation 5 was designed to be the fastest Foundation yet — we measured the performance of our JS dependencies, we built out a new, speedy CLI that uses libsass for crazy fast compiling performance, and we rewrote our docs so they'd help you get up to speed faster than ever before.
We've also put some time into making sure we load quickly through a smaller request in 5.1. To that end, we optimized our compiled CSS and removed about 10% of the CSS lines (okay, the byte reduction is smaller than that, but come on, that's a cool number). Same framework, same compatibility, same syntax, just less redundant CSS. We'll keep hammering on this until we're satisfied, but this ought to provide a nice little boost.
More Utilitarian
If you're into JS (and I mean, who's not), you'll be stoked to find some new toys in the Foundation JS, foundation.utils. There were a few things we wanted to have available and we thought you might as well, so we built out and documented the new utilities for you to use!
If you're not a JS geek, you can skip this section and go right to the next one, like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book. We've added a drop-in jQuery $ selector replacement called big S, which is up to 20% faster! Watch out for an imageLoaded event that we've added. We even placed a throttle and debounce method to prevent events from happening more than they should. There are some other shiny utilities included, and you can check them out in the docs. Added bonus: we've created an option to let you set a custom namespace, in case conflicts with other libraries are causing you headaches.
Fewer Bugs
It wouldn't be a new release without it being more awesome than before, so we've gone through and fixed bugs in the block grid, forms, off canvas, and more. You can find the complete list of closed issues in this release here.
... and the Kitchen Sink
Finally, we brought back the kitchen sink, a single place you can check out the vast majority of Foundation components all at once. It's a great snapshot of everything Foundation offers, as well as an awesome way to test if you want, to say, submit a pull request! Which we love, by the way, when you do!
We love working on Foundation and making it better, and we have a lot more in store. You can follow our progress on 5.2 on Github. If you see something you'd like to contribute to, we'd be happy to have you on our virtual team — in fact in 5.1 we've included a number of pull requests from you guys, which makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Upgrading to 5.1 is as easy as replacing your CSS/JS (for the simple downloads) or updating your install from the command line — no migrations, no changes needed. We hope you love it, and if you have feedback, let us know on our shiny new Forum.
