All good points and unfortunately a RW situation that is far from ideal. I understand why you have to use resources. RM said over 12 months ago they would add warehoused images to RW 7.1.
I’m going to keep this thread going for the purpose of warning customers about RealMac support. I’ll update my progress with obtaining support. I just don’t think it’s right for people paying a lot of money for a tool like RapidWeaver in order to make their income, assuming that the the company that makes it will support it. A fancy product website and active forum gives the impression that the company stands behind the product. Of course it wouldn’t be much of an issue if the product was properly tested before release (many of us are well aware of RealMac’s quality issues in the past).
So it took 6 FULL DAYS before I received the first response from RealMac about my issue. This first response (by an English-as-a-second-language technician–“Sorry to learn about this issue encountering for you”) did not attempt to begin any troubleshooting other than asking “Is this a recently upgraded project file?”.
I’m going to update when (if) additional progress is made. My support ticket has now been open for 7 days.
For anyone that is interested…8 is the number of days it took for RW to determine that the inability of my file to open properly is “not their fault”. In truth, they are partially correct–the actual problem was an incompatibility between Stacks 3.5x and the SiteMap plugin (simply removing the SiteMap plugin allowed the file to open fine). However, I point at least half of the blame at RealMac–it should not just freeze with no other user feedback if there’s a problem with the plugin. At the very least, if they are not willing to change this behaviour in the software, then they should accept the responsibility of fielding support tickets in a timely manner.
Honestly, Isaiah’s very simple troubleshooting (see thread above) allowed the issue to be solved in about 5 minutes. If RealMac has responded with something similar within 24 hours, I would have been able to close the ticket in under a day and would praising the company. Instead I find myself resenting the fact that I’m locked into the RW ecosystem (and generally pleased with the service of other vendors in this ecosystem like Yourhead).
I can’t wait until someone creates an alternate client to RW that supports the Stacks framework. I would drop RW in a microsecond.
My very simple support case was open for just over 8 days. Shame on you, RealMac.