Hi Dan, I just finished watching your No 37 video, Wow you have done a great job and have been so open to us all about where you have come from and were your are going. For me wanting to use elements for creating commercial websites its important that I can link a shopping cart and have CMS so my clients can access an make changes as most of my client websites are restaurants and cafes and some service industry like plumbing, Air Con toadies etc. So have the two above components are going to be a must have if I am going to use elements, rather than classic, can i ask how different is your elements to say elements in Squarespace (of course we will own the RW elements Website) macca
I would like to see more discussion on CMS and e-commerce
macca
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Hi @macca This was my first comment several months ago about Elements. Dan’s answer was that Rapidweaver is “static website builder” but that a CMS could be considered after the final release, probably as a third party addon. Since then, third party addons seem to have evolved a lot and are no longer very obvious for the moment. Elements is under construction and is undergoing significant changes, additions and removals. We have to wait to have a better view of what the finished product will be, I think. As soon as we have the Elements APIs, I think we will be able to create a CMS via components using AI without too much trouble. This approach is not going to guarantee a bright future for third party addons… Especially if Elements integrates an AI to produce components on demand, which I really want (rather than having to continue to copy-paste what gpt, claude, … provide me; I remain in the Realmac universe on a no-code approach, otherwise I wouldn’t be here).
Actually, I think that there will be a great market for really good add-ons…not so much for the simple ones that populated much of the Rapidweaver add-on world. Just how many text plug-ins that can use Google fonts do we need anyway?
To use a real-world example, let me pick on Weaverspace–Joe Workman’s excellent work for Rapidweaver stacks (yes, all based on Isaiah’s Stacks plug-in). If Elements goes the route of building in a Component Studio and integrates generative AI into it so that we get text-to-code, then many of Joe’s wonderful stacks are no longer needed since you will be able to create them as you need them. However, Joe has projects like TCMS (Total CMS) that require a lot more work. Yes, it can be built using products like Cursor-AI, but it is still very involved even with AI assistance. Add to that the need to keep a very complex project up-to-date and I don’t think many people will want to mess with that. Building out a great CMS is not easy. Take a look at the differences between Wix/Squarespace and Shopify. Wix and Squarespace both offer CMS capabilities, but neither come close to what Shopify offers–at least not for building out on-line stores.
Heck…take a look at this forum. It is a CMS. I use a lot of forums, in spite of being shy and reserved and afraid to share my opinions (no comments from you, @Bruno). There is a huge difference in the quality of the user experience. If it were easy to build a quality product, there would not be this much difference in the forums I use.
To sum it all up, I am hoping for a Realmac focus on getting the Elements foundation out so very simple static sites can be released…now. Then I’m hoping for a deep GenAI integration so that both beginners and experienced developers can use the power of GenAI to customize what we put out using a combination of GenAi and site code editing tools. If the foundation is strong, then custom Components like generic CMS’ will be possible without GenAI. With GenAI and strong foundation, there is no telling what Element will be capable of doing.
just for fun no idea whether this would work or not I asked cursor to produce a simple cms with password using tailwind to alter text and image
need to play when I have some time. probably will not work, especially in tailwind playground. uses alpine as well
tried it in whisk
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It is good to play around! I’m sure that there are developers that could roll their own custom Component(s) for Elements that would result in a great CMS…especially with tools developing the way they are. Because there are so many details for creating complex projects like a CMS, I can easily see a business opportunity for someone to create a Component they would sell for use with Element, if Elements allows for that market.
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Hi @jscotta For me, a CMS is a markup system that allows for remote updates of elements (or the entire) website without having to use a website creation software. WordPress and the like are both website creation software and a CMS since the software is hosted on the site (which is not economical in terms of space when you have multiple websites). I consider this to be cheating. I think my earlier comments on CMS may have caused some confusion. I want to emphasize that, for me, a CMS should not be a site design tool, only an online updating and publishing tool (blog/vlog…). Website pages creation is a separate matter (and it will become even more so when everyone realizes that building one page with AI assistance has become very simple, even with highly complex effects like rotating tetrahedrons with video mapping on each face, and video changes with every full revolution 
). Hence, the insistence on a CMS that primarily allows updates from an iPad while sitting on a couch, with voice dictation, of course (you need one hand to hold Jack and the other to pour Daniels 
).
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Our primary goal is to get Elements shipped as a 1.0 product - the focus is to create the best static website builder on the Mac. Version 1 will not include a CMS. However, we have some plans on being able to work with online data sources, not to mention we now have the beginnings of Elements Cloud that open up a lot of possibilities. So in the short term no CMS built-in, but longer term things are looking very interesting.
Don’t forget, Elements also has an open api/language, so anyone can build solutions for it… perhaps once it’s launched someone will create a CMS for Elements or a way to connect to existing CMS systems
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Please don’t tie Elements to your cloud services. Option, yes. Required, no. It it requires cloud services to use, there is little reason to chose it over other cloud-service based website building tools.
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The ability to edit websites directly in your browser is certainly the main feature of most of today’s Content Management Systems. Wordpress lives and dies by the concept. And honestly how most people will see it. Uses for them include allowing users to add content to the system via the browser with nothing downloaded (all server-side). The specific uses beyond basic website editing (text, images, even pages) like blogs and on-line stores just extend that idea.
However, I prefer to use non-browser based tools to develop and edit my websites/apps. I’m probably in the minority but I’d think most RW/Elements users think as I do or else there would be no need or market for Elements. For editing blogs, I prefer to use Marsedit. That is one of the issues that I had with TCMS is that I was required to build out even the simplest of blog management tools and then go online to post the blog content. There was no way to use my on-device automation tools to do anything. And I hate doing repetitive work that is required but adds no value.
I think that once they get Elements working on the Mac, it will not be much of a stretch for them to get it working on the iPad (relatively speaking, of course). Thus you and your couch can have romantic engagements to do your editing using a native app rather than a clunky web based interface.
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I personally prefer a browser based CMS, as this would provide cross-platform capability. Elements is GREAT for concept, design, and creating fully static websites. By having an OPTION for a CMS “connected” to the cloud, the possibility of two-way synchronization exists. THIS IS A HUGE POWER FEATURE FOR ME!
I understand that an app would be capable of this too. But THAT is another app with its own development and capabilities to deal with.
I hope that the browser-based CMS comes from a third-party component (maybe Joe will port TCMS over). But personally, I would prefer a couple specialized CMS powered features like a blog and maybe a store to be in the native app. If I wanted to live in a browser, I’d just sell my soul and start using Chromebook’s (God forbid).
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I doubt that 
I totally agree. Not a chance. He’ll create his own app from scratch first.
I mostly agree @Flash . Joe is not interested in anything to do with Realmac, at this point. However, if Elements ships and gains momentum, his mortgage payment may have a say in the matter.
Perhaps.
Dan, Ben, and the rest of the Realmac team chose to head in an entirely different direction when Stacks decided to leave. As a result, we now have Elements.
Elements is nothing like the original App planned by Realmac. Instead, it is 100% modern, incredibly powerful, and poised to move far beyond anything Rapidweaver could have ever done while maintaining legacy compatibility.
I’m not downplaying the emotions and perceptions at the time, they were what they were and belong in the past. Please don’t rehash any of it again. It’s over! And the Realmac community, with Elements, will be better in the long term because the separation happened.
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