A couple questions before purchasing Rapidweaver

Classic
1

Considering purchasing Rapidweaver.
I have a couple of questions.

(1) Can I import already finished pages by code (by an old Kompozer) instead of having to redo them?

(2) Is there a screen for viewing code?

(3) Can I open an existing page directly in Rapidweaver and rework in Rapidweaver?

2

Hi there,

  1. No, not really. You can probably fudge it but itā€™s not what RW is good at.
  2. You can use Inspect Element and look at the code but I suspect you want to be able to edit the code. In which case, no.
  3. An existing page built using something else? No. Again, there are probably ways to fudge it using an HTML page type but itā€™s not what Rapidweaver is designed for.

Iā€™ve found that once you get the hang of it that RW is so quick to work with that itā€™s pretty straightforward to grab bits off an existing site and re-work them in Rapidweaver.

I think RealMac still does a demo version though, limited to a page or two so you can try it out for yourself.

Good luck.

Rob

3

Thanks, Rob! Looks like Iā€™ve got to keep looking! Rats, I thought this would work for me! But thanks for taking the time to answer my questions!-
ā€“MJ

4

If youā€™ve got the time and they still do a free demo version, Iā€™d urge you to take a look. RW really is a great way to build websites and may persuade you to change the way you think about the best way to design them.

Of course, your mileage may varyā€¦:sunglasses:

Rob

1 Like
5

Iā€™ve got an entire site built. I like the design. I just hate the thought of starting over! Just wish I could import the basic design! Or make my own template!

6

Can you make a page and save it as a template?

7

You sound like you re looking for an HTML editor - RapidWeaver is not that. Itā€™s a theme and plugin based web authoring tool. It can build from themes and plugin things that would take days of hand coding in an hour or even less, but wonā€™t work like Kompozer or similar.

Flux by The Escapers can work that way, but in the end wonā€™t offer you the level of help that RapidWeaver and the community of add ons can. Some of the sites people with no coding knowledge have built with RapidWeaver are staggering, and some are fully responsive too!

It would take a change of mindset from where you are to work with RapidWeaver rather than try to to treat it like something else, but you wouldnā€™t regret it if you did.

with kind regards,
Karn.

8

Thanks for your input. Still canā€™t make up my mind! Iā€™m so used to being in control of designing a page! Hard to switch the mindset! It sounds lIke youā€™re right, if I can just wrap my brain around it!
MJ

9

Another question: Can a template be altered? Say a background color changed from green to gray, for example?

10

Absolutely. Although each theme has different options that can be changed - some more than others - you can usually customise a theme to get what you want.

Then there are ā€˜blankā€™ themes like Freestack and Foundation which allow you design a site from the ground up, however you choose.

11

mjkrech,

If you can extract the content from your (existing) site, just the text and images, it shouldnā€™t be too difficult to drop it into RW. As Rob says, try the demo. You may be surprised by the extent to which you can customize appearance - all, effectively, by changes to the CSS, which is what underlies RWā€™s Themes.

Itā€™s also possible to retain a fair amount of control over most aspects of your site; custom CSS and JavaScript (etc) routines can all be added.

One of RWā€™s greatest strengths is the 1,000+ add ons which do most of the hard work for you while at the same time being very customizable

This set of examples ought to impress!

12

Thanks. Will seriously consider it. Have demo downloaded. Will try playing with it soon.

13

One more Q. Iā€™m assuming they come with CSS set up? With a way to manipulate style sheet?

14

Depending on how you marked it up, you may be able to reuse a lot of the html. After all, <h2>, <p>, <em>, &amp;, <strong>, etc. work just as well in RW as anywhere else, as long as you make sure that you have ā€˜ignore formattingā€™ set. Iā€™ve transferred large chunks of websites this way.

15

Thank you! Sounds good! About ready to play with the demo. Psyching myself up.

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if youā€™re used to being in control of the HTML ā€“ then you might consider building your own theme ā€“ the theme API is on GitHub and RW is, at its very core, super extensible in a bunch of different ways.

The surface of RW is designed to be very user friendly so that even a novice can build a quick site. But if youā€™re comfortable with HTML you can build your own theme. Or if you like frameworks you can use something like Foundation for Joe Workman to do some amazing things.

RW is as geeky as you want it to be. :stuck_out_tongue:

Isaiah

17

@mjkrech - since you seem to know what you want your site to look like, Iā€™d highly suggest you check out two specific themes: FreeStack (and its sister theme FreeStack Responsive) and Foundation. Both are basically ā€œblankā€ themes that allow unlimited control over the look and feel of your website. I donā€™t believe that there is a showcase of Foundation sites yet - but Blueball Design has showcases for the responsive and non-responsive themes. And, there are a lot of Foundation sites on the Rapidweaver showcase site.

As someone who built a lot of sites in Dreamweaver over the years, I felt a bit penned-in when I first started using Rapidweaver. But, with the advent of these themes - and with Stacks, I havenā€™t touched Dreamweaver in well over a year. For small to medium-sized sites, thereā€™s no way Iā€™d go back.