Today marks the 20 year anniversary since the first public beta of RapidWeaver launched way back in 2004 — Can you believe it?
We were planning on releasing the first public beta of RapidWeaver Elements to celebrate this date, but shipping software on time is notoriously difficult (even after having 20 years of practice). However…
In today’s video we celebrate this huge milestone by publishing the very first webpage from RapidWeaver Elements to the internet. You can view the page here.
Watch the video below to see some relics from the past along with the moment I publish the Elements webpage.
Thanks so much for the past twenty years of support, we really couldn’t have done this without you
Congratulations on 20 years — here’s to 20 more!
Can’t wait to get started with Elements?
You mentioned charging for the alpha. Would that simply be purchasing a full license for Elements prior to the final release (I like the idea for testing, developing elements/components, and to support your work), or would it also be necessary to also purchase another license once the final version of Elements is released?
I noticed on the Elements page that you’re using elements, custom elements, and global components in the marketing copy. Is this the evolution of the naming discussion/poll from recent weeks? FWIW I like it.
Also nice to know that Elements is using Alpine.js behind the scenes.
Congrats on 20 year, provided a lot people with easy access to publishing their websites. Excellent time to release the next generation - Elements.
Really good to see a webpage published, like the stars and floating register amongst them.
Looked at the code, glad I have been learning tailwind, I understand a bit. Roll on being able try out.
Again congrats on 20 years and close to releasing the alpha/beta.
Even the first published page shows a small subset of what Elements will be capable of. Like the whole page good choice of colours etc.
Been using it for 19 years! I am also hoping for another 20+ years!
Alpha in June? Name the price. I’m in! I’ve mentioned I have a new website rolling out. Would love to wait and build the site with Elements! Would happily provide feedback as this is a personal project that I have time to play with. Perfect for Alpha and Beta testing.
Happy 20 years. Looking forward to messing around with Elements. If you can divulge a few sources for tackling some of the things not included with Elements…like strong form builders that don’t cost so much to use. Also looking forward to seeing how Elements handles CMS. If you could also do a video focusing on animations like those on the new Elements page.
I looked at the element structure, really pretty doggone clean. This is obviously a sales page and not something that would be used for search engine submission. I don’t know enough about data: and data-state: So I have to simply say, Congratulations on the first page published!
This is a native Tailwind feature that allows you to style elements based on HTML data- attribute values. Handy for when you want to control the styling based on some form of state or local data attribute.
Yes, but note that Alpine is not “baked-in” to RapidWeaver.
Each developer can choose to use Alpine.js or something completely different should they wish. There are tools in the Elements language that will allow each developer to include javascript specifically for each/all of their element(s).
Happy birthday Rapidweaver, if I remember i had never in my life done anything with website, i downloaded the free version to try, you could do 3 pages I think) having never donre a website before, I did manage my 3 pages and bought the full version, now i am waiting for Elements beta, alpha full as soon as you put it on line
Congratulation again
Hmm, so hypothetically if I used one element from one developer who used alpine.js, and another element from another developer that used react.js, and a third element from yet another developer that used jQuery.js all on one page I would end up with a project that included (and loaded) alpine.js, react.js and jQuery.js?
While I love the ability to use whatever libs I want, it does make me wonder if it would be beneficial to have one DOM manipulation/component library that you can always depend on being there, rather than have developers always using whatever libs they want and potentially bloating out the build size. While JavaScript performance is much improved today, shipping more JavaScript still tends to negatively impact performance (especially on mobile devices).
Your assumptions are correct here, you could potentially have a page with multiple JS libraries (alpine, jQuery etc) if you use elements that require them.
We’d rather not limit the JS libraries a developer can use as it allows for far greater flexibility. For example, another library might be a better choice for building a dashboard with pretty charts etc.
However, we can maintain a list of recommend libraries developers use to keep this to a minimum. We could also build this into the search on the addon store and within the app, so you can find elements using a certain library.
Is this the evolution of the naming discussion/poll from recent weeks? FWIW I like it.
