Craft, CSS Frameworks, Bower & Grunt setup suggestions I would like to use a CSS Framework like Zurb Foundation with Craft. I also want to manage my bower dependencies and I want to use Grunt to concat and minify my sass/js as well as compress my images. All this good stuff is happening on my local computer running Mamp Pro. I'll then move it to a Staging server once everything is set up.

I have these folders/files in my directory. 

.bowerrc
bower.json
-craft
-dev
 -bower_components
 -scss
  .htaccess
  index.php
  robots.txt
-node_modules
-public
Gruntfile.js
package.json


The idea of my workflow is to work in the "dev" folder (html, scss, js) and when it's time to push to Staging server I use grunt to copy/minify/compress into the "public" folder. That way I can send only the "craft" and "public" folders.

If I'm working in the "dev" folder my templates would need to link to the files in the bower_components folders as well as my unminified code. When I publish to the public folder everything gets the minified/concatenated version. 

My question concerns templates.
I know that templates are in the "craft" folder. How would I get craft to choose between 2 base _layouts (one built for dev, one built for speed) based on which folder my index.php file is located? Is there a better workflow solution?
In my humble opinion, this is a task for Grunt / Gulp, not for Craft.

Addy Osmani has an excellent article on Environment-specific builds that would be interesting for you and the kind of use case you mention.

In short, gulp-replace or gulp-processhtml and gulp-preprocess will give you what you need to build such functionality in your build scripts. Similar plugins exist for Grunt as well.

As for file organisation, I generally keep my package.json and gulpfile.js files at the root of the repo / website. I find it a lot easier to manage paths.