We came up with a lot of ideas (more than I’ve discussed above), and nothing felt right. In the end we decided the “?” at the top of the inspector was enough, and moved on :smiling_face:
We’re open to suggestions, as always!
I suspected that using the info icon would disrupt the clean design, so I completely understand. I’m not sure if it’s technically possible, but if the option title could be clickable, it wouldn’t affect the design. Of course, it wouldn’t be as immediately clear for users as an info icon, but every application has those hidden features that users are thrilled to discover once they find them .
It’s funny you suggested that, we did also think about doing something a little more hidden, but again we passed on it due to the more important issues we need to fix for the beta.
I think we might come back to this later and implement something like your suggestion
We did look at it, but it would be a HUGE amount of work due to the number of third-party stacks and plugins - We could certainly do a content importer at some stage if it becomes a big request from customers, and that would get you part way there.
However, I’ve found once you get to know the Components in Elements it’s quite quick to rebuild a site in it and easy to copy and paste the written content.
I could certainly do tutorials on this, perhaps you guys could suggest designs or sites and I could show you how to re-build them in Elements. Would be great to make sure Elements is up to the task and useful for users migrating!
Personally, I’m not in favor of automatically converting old projects to Elements. Rebuilding them completely has more advantages for me:
It’s the perfect way to get to know Elements and discover its ins and outs.
From my experience so far, the more I experiment with Elements, the more possibilities I discover, which I then want to apply, making the new site look even more modern and polished.
It’s an ideal opportunity to review the old site, deciding what should stay and/or be updated, and what’s unnecessary and can be removed.
Interesting idea, Dan, though I can’t imagine you fitting one more video into you and your family’s life!
For me, the value there might be how can Elements achieve what a particular stack has done for me. So, yes, maybe a video ‘makeover’ of a site would be interesting and informative. But maybe better would be some kind of documentation, organized by stack name, of how to achieve the same functionality of that stack in Elements?
Thinking on that solution a bit more, you could do a poll here that asks us “What are your top 10 used/useful stacks?” Then compile the list and document as many as you can. The good news is some will be super short. For example, I use several font and typography stacks and, basically, Elements has incorporated their functionality—and more. So all you would need to do is direct people to the documentation and videos you already have/will have on fonts and text formatting. Other ‘Stack Hacks’ (how’s that for a name?) may take some noodling and require a bit more of a step-by-step approach.
I understand that this is a lot of effort for a short-term need, namely, current customers transitioning to Elements. And that, over time, stacks will not be a reference point for users of Elements. But I think that transitioning customer base is where the bulk of your sales are going to be for the next year or so, especially if stack developers don’t jump on the conversion wagon to make it easier/more familiar to keep using their components. And, so, to save us some time on our learning curve, Stack Hacks may be a really useful resource.
I think that the approach and use of Elements must be done by abandoning references to Stacks. The very design of Elements does not make it a “suite” of Rapidweaver but a new product. So I believe that we will save a lot of time by no longer wanting to “port” Stacks to Elements but that we will save time by learning to make the effects we want with the help of AI and to integrate this code (not only custom components). This is why I think that the place of third-party developers is impossible to define to this day.
With the beta V2 your proposal of a video for the construction of a site with three or four pages seems to me to be a necessary idea. When we finally have a clear vision of what Elements is, then we will finally be able to take “command” of what we do not want to do ourselves (keeping in mind what Dan indicated about users who are now not novices for Elements). The list of what we want will perhaps then be quite short.
I guess that is what I thought the display toggle would be used for; to make it so that I could toggle between working with a design element to edit and then the toggle would let it work how it would in a normal website.
One thing I love about the way it worked before is I would rarely need to leave RW to see how my site works.
@dan One of the reasons I suggested the above ‘Stacks to Elements Primer’ is for easy understanding of how to create stacks-based elements like this, made with Simple Tabs from 1LD:
HTML, CSS and Java code done, all that’s left to do is copy and paste. I don’t know if this exactly answers your question but AI tools are perfect for creating this kind of component. In fact, with Claude and Docker we have an AI code creation station at home that we can test at will. We can even develop website creation software… well it already exists, but while we’re reinventing the wheel
More seriously, your question brings us back once again to a subject that we don’t like: the future of websites and their design as we know them. So I’ll avoid going any further, I’m being playful but I still know how to spot the limits.
Yah, I have used GPT for stuff at work and when my coding colleagues tried it, it didn’t work. The solution: trial and error, iteration or hiring a coder.
Even assuming solutions like this tab interface can work via external resolution, it is clearly not a v2 component in Elements. It is a code container. And if having to use code – whether from one’s coding brain or AI – to achieve these site features is the future of Elements, then we have to agree that the tool can not be billed as Rapidweaver calls itself: ‘The Easy to Use Web Design Software for Mac.’ Maybe that is the direction RealMac wants to go in, and that some site developers want. But I am not a coder, and I don’t have the time or bandwidth to become one. I dabble: a copy here, a paste there. Fine. But I don’t know syntax. So that approach doesn’t appeal to me.
If that’s how I have to go about building a site, I might just stick with Rapidweaver. It seemed to me that Elements was going to be a great cross between drag and drop design (like Square Space and WordPress) and full-throated customization options.
Above, Dan had replied “I’ve found once you get to know the Components in Elements it’s quite quick to rebuild a site in it and easy to copy and paste the written content.” I don’t consider having to implement code to achieve a feature to be quick, or easy.
I totally agree with you. The paradox in the current situation with AI pushing everyone is that what we were very happy to have (RW Classic+Stacks) is disappearing and the replacement does not suit us whether it is on the AI side or on the “copy-paste” side of code that we do not understand and for which we absolutely cannot guarantee the security of an architecture deployed on a server (I am thinking of a blog and/or a cms). Yes, stacks have a cost but it is the price of the time we save and the quality of the programmer’s work to which I add the pleasure of building a site with these tools. On the pleasure side, although I can perfectly see the interest of AI professionally, it is less, unfortunately. I add that each time that pleasure is lacking whatever the quality of the product it does not work (3D TVs, augmented reality glasses google glass, segway, Juicero …). As David Roth said, “If everyone can do it, there’s no magic,” so customers desert…
Elements is still in development, so it’s not feature complete — our goal is to allow anyone to build a website without writing a line of code.
Once Elements ships and third-parties start producing components I’m confident you’ll be able to build the website you want without having to use AI or code. It’s early days in the land of Elements, perhaps stick with Classic for now.
Hi Dan
me too a long term (many many years) still waiting to get the beta to start using Elements very much looking forward to converting current projects I and working on.
Cheers
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