Stacks 3 Public Beta

We’ve posted a more complete feature breakdown of Stacks 3 to the YourHead Blog – have a look and download the beta.

Enjoy!
Isaiah

Wait, what’d I miss?

@isaiah
Thank you for your response … but why not with all previews?
split2 and Waterfall are saved too today.

Downloaded Stack 3 (beta), installed it and payed the upgrade. Stacks is the most wanted Rapidweaver plugin. Happy sinds the first day the Stacks plugin arrived.

@oscar: i’m not sure. if you contact me via support or through the Stacks slack cannel and send the file i can give you more precise details.

@isaiah

Thank you. It’s not a problem.
I have changed the settings to preview.

Now I have all previews again. There is no problem to solve :wink:

Stacks 3 is a wonderful tool.

@isaiah
The reason for the different icons is simple, I think.
I have changed the homepages for testing this.
When the home page is a stacks page, the stacks icon appears.
Is the homepage of the project not a stacks page, the preview icon appears.

I agree completely! I bought Global Content and love it but now I can’t use it really because it’s not compatible with the Blueball Freestack Theme, so Partials looks like a similar solution :wink: I wish the link to the download was in html somewhere, gotta go back through the vid to find it now :slight_smile:

I used Global Content with Foundation and liked it but overall Partials seems like the way forward as even Joe is now advising.

Frankly I like seeing the content on the preview page without needing to publish to the server. Partials is also simpler to implement and doesn’t require .php pages if you don’t want them. They can also be individually edited on specific pages and that can’t be done with Global Content. In addition Global Content pages were often flagged inside Google Webmaster as not being mobile friendly. It was Google’s mistake.

On a performance level I don’t know if there is any difference in speed or SEO value between Partials and Global Content but for building the site Partials is the standout breakthrough for Rapidweaver in recent times.

One slight point to be aware of is that Rapidweaver will often switch a page from .php to .html after you remove Global Content and add a Partial instead. I view this as a Rapidweaver bug and in theory it could lead to lots of 404 errors if you have links going to .php pages. It also means that if you have .php pages on the server RW will upload .html pages alongside them causing all sorts of possible problems unless you are vigilant.

To the best of our knowledge, RapidWeaver doesn’t make this change… Plugins themselves can, however, specify the file extension that is used for a page.

All my pages were previously .php because of Global Content. After replacing them with Partials they automatically became .html.

I changed my preference in site settings to .php and found they still became .html if I removed SEO Helper from a page, which requires .php.

All things being equal I prefer .html because it has a faster response time and places less strain on the server during heavy traffic but having pages change from .php to .html or vice versa without warning can lead to issues. I was having problems at one stage where SEO Helper didn’t appear to be working and it turned out that a .php and .html version of the page were both sat on the server. That’s an FTP issue with RW.

@Nikf Could you perhaps discuss this with developers to find a safe way forward?

I’ll bring this to @isaiah’s attention.

It seems to me (as totally not an expert) that maybe it would make more sense in the future, for all pages to simply be .php pages. I seem to spend a fair bit of time switching from .html to .php as soon as any functionality gets popped in, why not make all sites with .php throughout instead? Are there drawbacks to this?

You can do this global for all your “new” pages, best when you start a project…
Change the extension to php, there is no problem.

That’s how I tried it @Oscar but it doesn’t seem to be sticking in all cases.

@Gabrielle There is no major reason not to use .php for every page other than a very minor speed penalty that most people will never notice. It might become an issue on some lower end servers if you receive a sudden rush of huge traffic because the server has to make lots of calculations for each visitor on the fly. I found a page once that described it all very well but can’t locate it at the moment. The response time for a server with .html pages is faster and puts less strain on the server.

One thing to consider from an SEO point of view is that if your links were all directed at /index.html and you now have pages for /index.php you’ll see 404 errors unless you create 301 redirects. If you simply have links like whatever.net/test/ it’s not a problem.

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I’ve found that link now. The server response from .html is 200 times faster than .php. Not a big issue on low traffic websites but noteworthy with lots of traffic. http://ahoj.io/load-time-of-static-html-and-dynamic-php-pages

It’s all rather academic for most people though unless you experience massive levels of traffic. Caching .php files would help.

It is absolutely essential to delete existing HTML pages by hand from the server if you have changed to php. Otherwise, there are broken links, because the browser always first selects the html page.
@ashleykaryl
Thank you for information concerning speed. I did not know.

Ok thanks for the info ;-).

I may come across as a bit biased, but it is with good reason. I have been using plugins from Yourhead.com since one of the early releases of the Collage plugin a decade ago. With every new release, wether it is an update or a new product it seems that @isaiah just keeps getting better.

We all knew (and agreed) that Stacks 2 was THE must have app for RapidWeaver (no offense to other plugins), but S3 is going to make S2 look old, dusty, and stale.

I seriously, can not heap enough praise on @isaiah for the work he put into S3. Both from a users and a developers standpoint S3 is superior in every way.

There are some minor changes that may take a few minutes to get used to but once you do you will not look back.

Weave with pleasure, weave with pride, weave with Stacks 3!

Gary

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Based on what’s been said about Stacks 3 and the persistent problems with RW6 - I would suggest the best thing would be for Realmac to sell Rapidweaver to Yourhead