After a busy month of adding new features, we’re switching our focus to fixing bugs, both in the app and in the core components.
This week’s dev diary takes a look at building a few different layouts in the forthcoming Fitness Project — This will be one of the many example projects that will ship with Elements later this year.
And finally, we’ll most likely be shipping a new beta later this week with a bunch of new fixes. Stay tuned for that!
Suggest a Feature
Don’t forget you can vote and suggest the features you want on our open Roadmap page.
Get the Beta
If you’d like an invite to the private beta, just post a reply in this thread, and we’ll email you an invite with all the details!
Thanks for Your Feedback
As always, keep the feedback coming. Your input has made all the difference so far. Thank you!
When can you import ours and the thousands of other existing RW sites into Elements? For me, this feature is the sine qua non. The import capability also is the key to your revenue stream in the future.
Elements will not import current Rapidweaver sites, great time to redo a site with a modern website builder. Information on the site could be copied and pasted etc into an Elements created site
Someone may correct me but that is my understanding
Roger. Dan told me as much. But there is no way, none, that I am going to recode our sites to Element. I can see no cost/benefit advantage in recoding.
With no bulletproof conversion path to Elements, we will move our to WordPress. WP is the industry standard with zillions of plugins. It is also of concern that RW plugin developers have been going out of biz.
Bottom line, barring some significant solutions to Elements meeting our nees, we will use the old version of RW for prototypes and sandboxes.
I doubt I am alone here.
That said, I can well appreciate the effort and difficulty of creating an app like Elements from whole cloth. Been there. Done that.
I have been building my company’s website (offline for overhaul) for the last year with Classic and invested in a lot of Foundry add-ons, etc. Now that Elixir is done that investment is obsolete. We are a startup small company with a completely radically different approach to SCADA. We are Mac and Linux only, and like you we created a completely different concept in monitoring and controlling hardware especially for hydrogen and microgrids.
I’ve been following the dev videos and I would very much like to get a copy of the Elements Beta to start testing and learning. Elements looks like what we want to go with
No-one forces you to use Elements. How will the import of your stacks websites to Wordpress work then?
I don’t think that having zillions of plugins for wordpress is an advantage really. Quite the opposite if you ask me. Lots of different developers, some of them offer plugins for free (as a hobby) but have no real interest in updating them. And if they get updated, you never know if they break something else on one or another site. And those that are professionally coded and updated, usually cost a ton of money each year. And don’t get me started on the security of wordpress sites
But to each his own. If using Wordpress means less work for you, that’s great
Also a small company in the renewables space – microgrids and with a tie-in to small scale desalination where necessary-- transitioning to a more systems engineering/integration approach to housing (renewably powered, of course); part of our founding long-term plans. We’ve been using RapidWeaver for quite a while. We’re also a Mac/UNIXen shop. I’ve been lurking here, avidly following the development of Elements. It’s likely we will transition to Elements as well.
But what caught my interest is your company description, specifically your SCADA and microgrids approach? Any way I can get more information? I understand you may still be “under the radar” but perhaps your system/products might be of use to us? We’re all inventing this new energy approach as we speak so, one never knows.
I’m not trying to sell you one way or the other but with extensive experience in building a very, very large Wordpress site I have an inkling of what you’re facing.
I don’t quite follow your cost/benefit argument as you’re going to be rebuilding your site whether you choose Elements or Wordpress.
WP may seem cheap to start but it’s likely to cost you far more in the long run with themes, plugins and constant updates to them. Unless you’re an experienced WP user the learning curve will be similar, if not greater, than with Elements.
Right now, Elements is not as intuitive or simple as it will be when the built in components are added, but the RealMac folks are incredibly responsive and I’d count on them to assist with issues. I’v definitely had my frustrations but I can see the progress.
If you site is data heavy and suited to a CMS style site then WP is probably a good choice but for static sites with fewer ‘moving parts’ I think you’re doing Elements an injustice by not considering it.
I may have a different definition to data heavy than most people. The WP site I was working on was well over 150,000 posts with probably a million images.
There is zero chance I would attempt anything like that with Elements and I suspect @Dan would agree.
The point is, choose the right tool for the job. Elements will comfortably cover many, many small and medium bespoke sites.
WP is king of the extremely large dataset realm but it’s seriously a nightmare trying to backup, manage and move sites which are over 120GB.