I am very exciting to introduce my latest work: Reverie. Reverie is an extremely versatile HTML5 WordPress framework based on ZURB’s Foundation, a powerful tool for building prototypes on any kind of devices, which means it’s responsive to your phones, tablets and computers. Reverie follows HTML5 Boilerplate standard and is hNews microformat ready. It is optimized for Search Engine while at the same time improve readability.
The reason I build Reverie is obvious: there are few frameworks on the web that actually satisfy the needs of each individuals. Different designers and developers have their own standards to judge whether the frameworks meet their requirements. And it’s the old saying, you can never find something that is 100% lives up to your expectation. After searching across the web and testing different framework for the upcoming theme of my other blogs, I found there are actually few out there could be taken into consideration. Those frameworks are good, and they are developed by professional developers and designers, but they just don’t meet my requirements. So I decided to build my own. And at the same time, I noticed the release of ZURB’s Foundation, and I knew what I was going to do.
At first, Foundation was not the only choice, there was actually one more option: Twitter’s Bootstrap. This is another great tool for building prototypes and was receiving tons of attentions on Github. But Bootstrap is not responsive, and it seems to be limited to 940/960 grid, an old favor to me. Three months after the announcing of the tool, I haven’t seen a WordPress framework/theme is built on Bootstrap. One thing to point out is Bootstrap is using LESS, and you probably heard a lot of debate on it. LESS is cool, but simply I don’t get used to it. And what I really agreed was what ZURB mentioned on Smashing Magazine:
All of these methods are a stopgap. The replacement technique might come out next month or next year, but really all of these tools will change drastically in the very near future. Tools like LESS help us get a little closer to a very clean solution, but at a higher technology and learning cost. We wanted Foundation to be the fastest way to prototype for all kinds of devices, so we paid a small price for truly separated markup.
What can Reverie do?
So let’s get back to Reverie. You have already known that Reverie is extremely flexible, so you can use it to build any kinds of theme you want, and the best part is, it is auto adjust to your screen resolution. To get the most out of Reverie, you should read through all the cool features and documents about Foundation. All the detailed usage of grid, layout, UI and tabs are well described.
Reverie is optimized for iOS devices. When saving as Home Screen app on your iOS devices, icons and loading images are automatically added. This is one of my favorite features and when you click the web app on your Home Screen, you can see the magic happens. To try it out, simply go to Reverie page and save it as a Home Screen app on your iOS devices. Reverie also has built-in several interesting features for WordPress, you can get the full feature list here.
Crafting Your Reverie on Foundation
Why named Reverie? Well, doesn’t that sound fancy? How about building your next dream on Foundation? Right now Review is hosted both on ThemeFortress and Github. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me, leave a comment, or post it in the forum.
Enough, want to have a try? Here is the gateway:
