Hi there
does anybody know if there is an alternative to EasyTubeGallery?
It seems that this is no longer supported in RW Classic 9.5 …???
EasyTubeGallery provided a really nice moving background to text
just like on https://huckyeichelmann.com
Hi @hucky,
There were, a few actually. But the best were made by Elixir (Cinema stack, part of the Foundry framework) and Stacks4Stacks.com (uTubeFill), and both these parties have stopped making stacks and deleted their back catalogue.
Eclipse ($20, Weaver’s Space) is still available, but I have no experience with it.
Cheers,
Erwin
Thank you, Erwin. Lately I see many company’s stop their stacks production… Does that have to do with Elements? A pitty, but I guess they have their good reason to do so. I will check out Eclipse then
Thanks again
Hi @hucky,
Partially - at least one dev (Elixir) communicated Elements as the main reason for closing down. Quite a lot of functionality that required specific stacks in RW, can be built with a few clicks in Elements. Certain aspects of frameworks are also obsolete with Elements, as those features are now part of the main platform.
The other side of the coin is that the RW+Stacks market is relatively small. Stacks (the plugin) is not on every RW user’s shopping list, so a developer can only sell their stacks to a subset of RW users.
To sell a stack that can be used for a lifetime to a small population of users, means that eventually your potential market becomes saturated. In order to convince people to shell out more money, a new stack must do that one thing extremely well, or needs to do something completely new and useful.
After all, why would a user buy a new stack to do something if one he already has does the job too?
The sheer number of grid stacks, column stacks, video player stacks, banner stacks, font stacks etc. is huge, yet most users only need one of each. Once bought, that user is no longer in the market for another stack that does the same.
So new stacks need to do something new, and that’s very difficult. Most things that are possible on a website have been put into a stack for a number of years. So, developers started to look at niches and very advanced use cases to cater to users that hadn’t been served yet.
Feeds is a good example of that - an excellent stack and very well coded, and pretty much the only option if you need to do the things that Feeds sets out do. But the majority of RW users has no use for it. Eventually, everybody that needs Feeds, has Feeds, and the income for Feed’s dev will shrink significantly.
This is what has been happening to quite a few of those specialised stacks.
The bigger devs shifted focus to frameworks a while back, to bring an end-all solution to some more tedious tasks in RW+Stacks.
And those frameworks did very well - so now, quite a few RW+Stacks users are also Foundry,Foundation or Source users.
The frameworks also meant a new source of income for those devs involved, and that worked for a while for most of them. In addition, some older stacks could now get new versions to be integrated into a framework too, and the dev could charge for the upgrade. Hurray - movement in the market!
but those Frameworks eventually faced the same problem: it’s hard to sell a framework to someone who already has one. Foundation 6 was a huge upgrade to the first Foundation, and basically sold itself to existing Foundation users, but Elixir had a hard time convincing Foundry 2 users to upgrade to Foundry 3.
In addition, while all this was happening, a number of other things happened too. WP matured. Elements was announced. So was Bloc(k)s. And DIY cloud based webdesign tools like Squarespace were maturing too.
So for some devs, those factors combined sadly proved to be too problematic. Devs that do this for a living, need to plan ahead, and with all that is happening planning ahead is either very difficult, and/or leads to the conclusion that effort is best put into something else.
It’s interesting to see what the future will bring. Elements is a force to be reckoned with, and the new stand-alone Stacks app will face the same challenges that RW+Stacks does (realistically needing a good framework to do anything useful for advanced/professional users), with the added problem of competing with Elements that does not require a framework. One thing the Stacks standalone app is changing, is that stacks can optionally be licensed for a limited time or limited domains more easily to keep the flow of income for the devs steady.
The future, Elements or Stacks Standlone?
Personally, I’m betting on Elements, with RW+Stacks as a backup to maintain sites for existing clients. Should RW+Stacks ever kick the proverbial bucket for some reason, I might install the Stacks standalone app to maintain those sites, but currently that app does not support opening existing RW+Stacks projects, so right now that is not a viable option.
Cheers,
Erwin
Thank you for the excellent and detailed insight explanation. I guess these things happen in all fields, in musi , too. Sometimes it feels as if the post Covid world is running on a different kind of fuel…
I personally would love to try out ELEMENTS but my humble faciities are present limited to a MacBook Pro with BigSur as the system… If I get another chance to go for a new Mac in this life, it is definitely on my shopping list. I wish Elements and all you guys involved in the brilliant work all the success that you deserve.
Cheers
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