Blogging with Pluskit

@ikemitsu it is indeed helpful. Because I haven’t been able to get Armadillo to work yet I have no idea of what the blog looks like or how it work. Does it allow or need design? When people have said they were using Armadillo and I looked at their websites, the sites sometimes look like it is just a white page with text. Since the company puts out some very nice themes I don’t believe Armadillo would put our a blogging product lacking style and class. I am just not able to access it yet. I am hoping Jonathan will get back to me soon and help me figure it out or figure out I can’t use it.

Meanwhile I am building the website with what I know because I am on something of a deadline.

Thanks for your help.

Armadillo will adopt the theme or anything you’ve set up in Rapidweaver. So some really nice looking blogs are possible. Have you checked Armadillo documentation http://docs.nimblehost.com/armadillo#getting-started for instructions and troubleshooting?

Yes I have checked them. It may be that the problem is getting to the right helpdesk person at HostGator. Ever since they were taken over their help deck and customer service has been, to put it extremely nicely, less than stellar.

I set up a test blog and a test folder so as to minimize conflicts. Even with just a minimum of pages and some text in the stacks it was a problem. I installed and reinstalled it numerous times. I removed the previous attempts from the server. Nothing seems to work

I did notice something curious from the link you provided. There seems to be a number of stacks included. I did not get those in the recent update and installation. Also the new installation is not installing in my RW7.

There are many possibilities of what is going wrong. But, after spending a couple of day doing pretty much nothing but trying to fix it and not succeeding, . I have to reduce it’s priority.

Nimblehost support might be able to help you. I have no knowledge or guesses about Rapidweaver 7 compatibility as I haven’t updated to it myself. Armadillo has worked for me very well with Rapidweaver 6, as well as the built-in Rapidweaver blog page with imported stacks.

How did you get the side bar to show up?

Hi Lawrence,

Take a look to this post:

Best

For the sidebar content, beyond the blog plugin defaults, I use Joe Workman’s Houdini stack. Doobox’s transporter stack has the same functionality

I was expecting to see a picture here. I have tested on the two pages here with the same negative results. Can anyone spot my mistake?
Never mind, I see I had not addedPlusKit into this new test site.

I have that stack. The footer works for me,but I can’t get anything to show up in the side bar.

3 questions:

  1. can you publish and share a link?
  2. in the Houdini stack setup, have you selected “sidebar?”
  3. the solution may vary by theme. Is that the theme your site will ultimately use?

http://vinegarman.com/armadillo_tester/

If you click and enlarge the images you will see side bar is selected. The footer works as expected. I have not tested the others.

I will not use that theme. I didn’t know it was theme dependent. Did I miss that in the sales materials :slight_smile:?

Oh shoot.

Ok, I use PlusKit/Houdini to put the sidebar onto the RW standard blog plugin page. The reason I asked about the theme is that different developers can sometimes call the sidebar something different in the code, which can make a difference when you’re trying a modification or stack placement.

I don’t personally use Armadillo and so I don’t think that I can be of much help. Sorry to get your hopes up :confused:

My best advice, if no one else pops in, would be just to email Jonathan directly.

Thanks. Houdini actually comes from Joe Workman’s group. I did a shout out to them and am waiting. Thanks again.

I am trying to import stacks into my RW Blog page using the newly released plus kit4 and it’s not working. I’m looking for some advice here.

What I want to do is take an extra content stack from a page titled “Untitled Page 2”, loaded with Cinema Slider slides and import it into the Extra Content area 2 of my blog page. I’m using the “Sweety” theme. The Extra content area 2 is the banner area in the header section.

I’ve tried inputting the following code into the sidebar of the blog page, <div id="myExtraContent2"@import((Untitled Page 2))</div> and applied ignore formatting and even cleared it, but to no avail.

I realize that using pluskit4 with the blog page is ‘bad’ but am hoping that just trying to fill EC2 would be simple enough that it wouldn’t mess up pluskit4. I just want to know if it works or should work.
Am I doing this all wrong?
Thanks for Listening!

I’m not super familiar with PlusKit (and to each their own if they want to experiment) but if the developer has an ‘X’ and the word ‘Bad’ beside what you’re trying to do, I’d think you’re potentially just asking for trouble to do it anyway (whether that be now or down the road).
https://discourse-cdn-sjc1.com/business5/uploads/realmacsoftware1/original/2X/d/dd329390f2c535543321ae087aa39c805a899b06.jpg

(PS - I hope that doesn’t come across as condescending, I don’t intend it to)

No worries jabostick and thanks. But, I had to try!

“I am trying to import stacks”

I strongly urge people to never import a Stacks page anywhere. It can be done, with a lot of caution, in very specific cases, with simple content… but mostly it only leads to headache and is why it’s disabled by default.

Stacks pages have page structures, javascript, extra CSS, and may include files and even run php before the page loads. PlusKit is able to pick up many of those things, but not all them. Some pages can integrate some of those things, but not all of them. This means that there are many things you can put on a stacks page – that will break if you import them into another page.

Instead: try going in the other direction. Find a stack that allows you to add the specific content into a Stacks page – Stacks pages are designed to be very tolerant to many types of content – and have built-in firewalls to help those different kinds of content share one page.

There are a lot of great blog stacks out there. Check out this page from @joeworkman that lists a bunch of the different options (a lot of them from his competitors – nice!)

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Thanks isaiah, but it worked… using this fellow’s example. Brilliant!

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Crap… worked fine till I exported/Published. Keeps crashing. Oh well.

If you’re interested there is a beta that corrects 3 of the most common causes of crashing during publishing. It would help a lot if you gave it a test.

We keep our beta things over on http://slack.yourhead.com

Isaiah