I am an infrequent Freeway user and am starting to redesign our companies very old site. I was just getting my head around using the ‘box model’ when FW7 was announced. I helped out a friend with his site and used an inline model with FW5 which worked OK, but obviously wasn’t responsive.
Is the box model still the way to go with FW7’s responsive features?
I’ve been out of the loop, there’s a lot of info to digest!
So to recap, should I use the inline box model AND FW7’s responsive features together?
Sorry if this has already been answered, I’ve read through a lot of the FW7 thread, but it’s hard to keep track with so many questions and answers in one long thread!
The so called Box-in-a-Box Model is just a representative for “Placing Items Relative to each other” and has unfortunately in our world even the wrong naming. This is just because people do not want to deal with expressions which have to do with code.
The naked truth is, that “positioning” items is the key skill - no matter how: Relative, Absolute or Fixed.
This is FACT and practice in the Web Develop World (no matter what editor you choose) - only Freeway’s community is different.
So to answer your questions:
Relative positioning is the one to choose if it comes to pre-structure your page. Absolute positioned (within the relative basic construction) is giving you the idea of “overlapping” items back. And finally the fixed items, which are often “navigations” these days.
Freeway7 is NOT other than all the previous versions - so yes, the Model is still alive (even more) cause it lets you re-arrange your construction just by a couple of clicks for specific items.
But it should be said that even absolute-constructions (which only exists in the Freeway-world by drag’n drop) can be handled responsive (I think - not sure). The downside of this method is, that you have to touch each of your items on each breakpoint and push it to a new (absolute) position.
As an infrequent user, I suppose it’s hard to get in - cause one thing for relative positioning is, that it requires some practice and training to challenge - and it NEEDS a plan before you start placing the first DIV (which is an item btw.)
I think that makes sense. I started to learn the inline method and used a friends’ site as a guinea pig. It worked OK, but I can’t remember everything I did to make things work. I can’t help feeling the time I spent learning it would have been better spent learning how to do it all by hand, bypassing FW entirely!
Does anybody know if the templates Freeway are selling* are inline/box/whatever-it’s-called or just elements placed directly on the page.
*as an aside, they really should include a decent template with FW itself, it’s a bit maddening that their built in templates are so terrible; It’s so much easier to learn by example).
Does anybody know if the templates Freeway are selling are inline/box/whatever-it’s-called or just elements placed directly on the page.
as an aside, they really should include a decent template with FW itself, it’s a bit maddening that their built in templates are so terrible; It’s so much easier to learn by example).
They look like inline to me. I’ve had some dialog with Softpress about templates and have been advised that the stock templates are being refreshed/updated, but no estimate of when they might become available… Deconstructing a FW layout is a good way to learn - I agree.