Yes, you can build a reponsive site with S2 — but why would you want to? RW6 and S3 are such a pleasure to build with, they are the best tools available and will make your job easier and faster. To my mind, upgrading and building the site in RW6 and S3 is a no-brainer — I would suggest you bite that particular bullet and then move on to your next decision.
Anyway, the most crucial element in this whole process is backup. Which you haven’t mentioned at all yet. What is your backup routine?
Well, the only reason I wouldn’t want to is because since I read that post about running both Stacks 2 & 3 concurrently, I’m worried I’ll mess up my existing site. I did mention backup but only briefly – I back up remotely using Crashplan but also back up to an external HD via TimeMachine, which I would do immediately prior to starting the new site, so I think I’d be okay.
So even if I were to use an e-commerce theme for my shop pages (I was looking at one by yuzoolthemes) I’d still need Stacks 3? I’m just looking for the easiest, quickest solution I can find, to be honest – something that’s just consistent and works.
Long answer — For a responsive site you first need a responsive theme. Then you need to make your content responsive. While you can achieve this in RW5 and S2 — using any of the responsive layout, column or grid stacks I suggested you research above — the workflow is a bit more laborious. So while it may be as consistent as S3, and work as well as S3, it won’t necessarily be the easiest or quickest solution, both short- and long-term.
As I mentioned earlier Stacks 3 has built-in responsive layout stacks, and you can see by the controls that they offer basic breakpoint options, which are great for most common scenarios. However if you need or prefer to configure your breakpoints manually then you should check out the other responsive layout options.
If time is your constraint, then looking at your current site, I would say all you need to do is simply choose your responsive theme, get one of the responsive layout options that will work with Stacks 2 — and simply transfer your current layout into the new responsive one.
Thanks! Y’see, that stuff comes easily to me – this stuff just scrambles my feeble, arty brain…
Yes, the quicker I can get this done, the better – as long as it’s consistent and clean and it works, I’m happy. So I have RW6, I’ll upgrade to Stacks 3 (from what you say, it makes sense), I have a few responsive themes I’m looking at (I’m quite taken by Sprouting by Yuzool) – that should be it, then? I’m resigned to the fact that I can’t simply export my site to RW6 because the shop pages all use the (now unsupported) Cartloom plugin so I have to rebuild those… but theoretically, once I have one page sorted, it’s just a case of repeating that. The site needs an overhaul anyway, so it’s perhaps a good thing that I’m being forced to do it now.
So that all sounds deceptively simple! No doubt I’ll be back… ; )
We’ve just release RapidCart Pro 4 Advanced, which is a free update for existing RapidCart Pro users and includes stock management (MySQL support required).