I’m looking for an app to replace my ageing Dreamweaver CS6, and RapidWeaver looks very promising. However, I have a few questions before I make the purchase.
Am I right that RW only uses Templates, and there’s no way to create your own page designs or edit the HTML/CSS directly (without buying further add-ons)?
The Eqwid shopping add-on. I see form the video that this is all handled through an account on Eqwid’s own website. Do they process the payments themselves and take a commission? Is is possible to add shipping costs by weight and destination?
If someone could flesh out how these things work, that would be really helpful. Thanks.
Although RW was originally designed to use pre-baked templates where all the design decisions have been made for you, there are some really good - and powerful - ‘frameworks’ which allow you to create sites with pretty much any design you like. This does involve extra purchases though -specifically the Stacks plugin and then the ‘frameworks’ themselves.
It’s perfectly possible to edit the HTML and CSS but this isn’t what RW’s designed for. You can tweak both, you can make loads of changes in fact, but it’s a theme-based system, not a code-based one.
‘Frameworks’ include Foundation, Foundry, UIKit and RWSkinz.
I’ve superficially used Ecwid and, even on it’s free plan, it’s pretty full-featured. I believe you can setup all those sorts of shipping iterations. They offer a few different payment options (their own, Paypal, Square, offline etc)
As Rob said, RW isn’t really meant to be code-based, though there are ‘html’ stacks/page types. There’s also this: https://rapidweavercommunity.com/addons/stacks/html-body , though I’ve never used it and not heard of others’ experience with it (and it would require an additonal purchase of the Stacks plugin, as well as the html body stack)
Thanks. It seems there’s a limit of only 10 items on the Free tariff, so that’s out. I’ve been using Prestashop, which is open source, with PayPal doing the transactions.
I already have an existing website designed, so unless I copied and pasted it into an RW template, I’m not sure that would work.
In reality, you can’t buy Rapidweaver on it’s own and build something nice, not unless you have a great understanding of code and a lot of time.
Some will say otherwise but to use RW effectively you also need to buy Stacks, which I think is about $40, plus a rake of add-ons (called stacks) that do all the fancy stuff on the page, and maybe also a theme or three.
Or, you can buy Rapidweaver and Stacks and one of the “freeform” themes, like Foundation, Foundry and the new uiKIT3. These come with everything you need to make great sites, no need for additional stacks.
Typically I’d say you need to budget $200 to get going.
Rapidweaver is great, but to create the sorts of sites that are showcased on the various Rapidweaver sites you will need to spend more than the cost of Rapidweaver alone. This is a reality often, shall we say, overlooked, during the sales pitch, but it is the reality for most.