when I load up RW, it tells me I have 2,203 stacks. I’ve been using RW for longer than I care to remember.
I’m looking for a strategy to clean up my stacks. Some are most likely outdated and no longer supported. What’s the best way to tackle this?
For that matter, it would be nice to do this with themes and plugins also.
It makes me realise that it would actually be helpful if developers could flag stacks, plugins and themes, that are depricated, to make the job easier or for RW to build in this mechanism.
there are two ways to do this. Right-click on a stack or a theme and click ‘Uninstall’. Or ‘Show in Finder’ and manually delete the things you want to get rid of.
About every 6 months I review the stacks I have. I move any stacks I no longer use into a special “Archive” folder. This way I still have the stacks (some old, some not used much) but I haven’t deleted them.
I use the manual method myself on my hard drive (not in RW) as it’s easier for me to see all the stacks and make decisions.
@svsmailus Although this isn’t full proof look at the last updated/modified date for each stack. Pretty safe to safe if the last update was 2013 you might want to pull it out of rotation!
I believe the oldest modified date I have for any stack is 2016. At any rate that’s a start. Not every developer is great at updating their last modified date so this isn’t full proof by any means.
@Mathew has the right idea I think. I stick stuff in an ‘old stacks’ folder when I think I don’t need it any more - and then you can guarantee that an old client with an even older site will pop up wanting a few changes and you don’t have that ancient stack installed any longer!
Well, after 3+ hours of sorting through here’s my advice:
As @Mathew & @robbeattie said, don’t delete, copy your old stacks to a backup folder.
Arrange the stack view by author and go to the website of the stack developer and search for the stack. If the stack isn’t there you can remove it.
A comment to stack developers.
There is a facility in RW to allow the user to click on either the info or help for a particular stack. This is often either greyed out or leads to a 404 page. Developers really should be using this facility. Even if it leads to a page that says that this stack is not longer supported.
A Comment to RW and Yourhead
You really should look at providing a better mechanism for dealing with depricated stacks.
Conclusion
This has been a real pain and took some 3+ hours out of my day. It should not be this complex. I was pretty miffed with developers who just removed the link to the stack webpage which led to a 404 or didn’t use the info/help facility. I’m also going to be far more cautious is which developer’s stacks I will buy. It’s also pushing me more in the direction of frameworks as they are far easier to manage.
Inside of the RapidWeaver prefs, you can disable plugins, themes and stacks from being loaded.
Also the number of stacks totaled as being loaded is a bit misleading. This number also includes every image that gets loaded into the Stacks Image Library. Each image there counts as a stack in the total.
