Following on from last week’s video, I wanted to give you an update on how the mobile navigation element is progressing and show off some of the new options we’ve built-in. Towards the end of the video I answer some of your questions about RapidWeaver Elements, they are well worth sticking around for as I share some juicy details about a future feature of Elements…
Have a watch and let me know what you think!
We love feedback!
Remember, we’re building Elements in the open so we can get feedback as we go. We want to make sure we’re building the product everybody here wants (including us). Share your ideas and feedback in the comments below.
I think you missed the mark on your answer on breadcrumbs and pages.
For instance, my sites go very wide and deep. That’s what happens when you try to keep building knowledge into one site, and hierarchy starts to be important to give people other ways than just a complex menu to navigate that type of site with.
So I end up with breadcrumbs that are more like:
MENU > SECTION > TOPIC > article
You’re reading “article” but you’re sort of interested in what other TOPICS might be there, so you want to be able to navigate by clicking on TOPICS in the breadcrumb. The way I handle that is that every SECTION or TOPIC is static page with information about that on it, but also a linked list of everything in the level below it.
Meanwhile, you are reading “article” but you may be interested in other articles in that TOPIC, as well, so I leave a breadcrumb of
PREV ARTICLE NAME ← Current Article → NEXT ARTICLE NAME
These things are essentially all coming off a complex menu, but giving people a different way, other than a traditional menu, to navigate.
Fantastic video, really liking the compact menu element. I think I like the Sticky option with a slight offset (~10-30px) from the top the best. It looks fancy.
Also really liked the answer to @rolisize’s question. Was great to hear you speak about your goal for RapidWeaver from its beginnings to today, which is to allow people to easily build a website from start to finish without a high learning curve or a cost that’s out of reach for a lot of folks, ranging from hobbyists/artists/bloggers/students/small businesses/entrepreneurs/etc.
Glad to see you’re looking at user’s posts and requests as a guide to what goes into Elements. So far it has lots of options.
Do you foresee any animations for some of these tools? Hover states (to give soft rollover effects), animating the hamburger icon, etc? Also haven’t seen too much mention over parallax effects and timed scroll effects.
Another fantastic update and demo! I’m glad you’re taking the time to build a website during development. This process is revealing the pros and cons as you go, which is a brilliant move. Staying true to the Realmac philosophy, YES!
Super excited to see the future expanded menu, nice job @ben !
Q: Will there be breadcrumbs in nested static pages?
Q: Could we manually curate a plain XML file that we hand build, i.e., an RSS feed, and upload it with our static pages? A stopgap until the full data feature comes to fruition.
At its core RapidWeaver has always been a static website generator, and at launch RapidWeaver Elements will be the same. As I said in the video, our focus is on shipping a solid product that allows people to build websites from the comfort of their own Mac. I spoke a little about the local data feature (think of it like a local CMS) in the video. Once we have this in place it will open up opportunities for an online CMS.
However, this will not be part of the initial Elements release. Sorry it’s not better news right now, but keep in mind we know where we’re going and what you guys want.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it did get built. Stick with us, it’s going to be an exciting journey!
We have an animation Element, it allows you to apply animation to pretty much any Element. We demoed an early prototype in these two older club element videos; Element Layer Animation, and Colour & Grid Animation — They are well worth watching!
But really, we can’t build everything into Elements (no web builder can do that!), but we’re doing our best to cover the most common use cases. Hopefully third-party developers will step into cover some of the more niche effects users want.
Yes, @ben is going to build an Element that will output a navigational breadcrumb - We’ll make this as flexible as possible.
I guess you could… but the RSS feature would fit perfectly with our plans on data.
We know we have a lot of work to do to cover everyone’s need, but we’re excited by all the great feedback you guys are giving us. It’s going to take a while to get Elements to where we want it to be, but we know we’re onto something special.
Just to be clear, some of us who have “blogs” have always used static site content, and the original RW “blog page” produces static content.
The issue for some of us is the incessant hacking attempts. The DB-on-web CMS approach is notorious for getting hacked. While I can’t stop my static site from being hacked, I can use mitigation techniques that reload known good site files if an unauthorized change is detected.
Indeed, if I’m going to use any CMS or database solution, I’d prefer the data for that live on my office server where I have better control and management over it, and use that data to produce static pages.
The problem with huge sites like mine is that redoing them in RW then again in Elements isn’t going to happen. RW isn’t the right product for my sites, but Elements is looking like it is.
I was surprised when you mentionned « static website ». What about CMS features ?