I’ve been experimenting to see what it would take to get a site developed that’s been developed in RapidWeaver to integrate with Airtable ( https://airtable.com ). My goal is to use Airtable’s API to retrieve data and dynamically publish that data in RapidWeaver-based sites. I’m hoping to create a stack to handle the API calls.
So far, I’ve had a lot of success. I’m getting realtime data from Airtable, and publishing both lists of records, as well as single records shown in detail. I’ve been trying to keep the design simple, so that I can focus on the techniques that are involved.
Best wishes with your project! Having additional options for displaying complex info is always useful. I’m not sure how many folks use AirTable currently (out of all the RW users) but your demo seems quite interesting.
Thanks for the nice feedback. I agree - I’m not sure how much of a crossover there is between RW users and Airtable users - but I do know that there are plenty of Airtable users that are looking for easy ways to Web-publish their data. I’m hoping to make it possible for those Airtable users to use RW to do that.
I believe that a lot of Airtable users are using it as a custom CRM of sorts, so they might not need something like RW. But I’ve seen Airtable used in a number of other interesting ways as well - from managing products and projects, to handling job applicants, and more. It will be interesting to see if and how people use this RW / Airtable integration concept.
Two years ago, I tried to use airtable to do what is now at this page : https://www.fftst.org/favoris/
But finally I did it otherwise (with Kuler SQL).
I don’t know if that helps you.
This is the link to my initial airtable database : https://airtable.com/shrJKp7tnS6wH4A7v
I wasn’t aware of Kuler SQL. It looks very interesting. Thanks for introducing it to me.
I think that what you were trying to do with Airtable and RapidWeaver is a great example of what could be possible, and possibly fairly easy to do, if a stack (or stacks) were available.
I was able to find a few old videos on Youtube and Vimeo where the Kuler SQL stack was demonstrated, and it seems as if it had a lot of potential. It’s too bad that it is no longer being supported.
I certainly will. I’m hoping to free up some time over the summer to explore the “Airtable stack” concept. I’ve developed a few very simple stacks in the past, but this will certainly push the boundaries of my stacks knowledge!
I’ve put together a very basic stack, which I’m tentatively calling “AirDrop.” You configure the stack by providing a few details about your Airtable database, such as your API Key, API URL, the specific view that you want to use, and the maximum number of records that you’d like returned.
Then you drop in whatever stacks that you want to use to display the data. For example, you can use a header, paragraph, and even HTML stacks. And finally, you add tokens to indicate the fields that you’d like to display, and where you want them displayed.
That’s all there is to it.
I’ve attached a few screen shots that show an example. In the example, I’m using an Airtable database that is used to keep track of real estate listings. There’s a screen shot showing what that database looks like, another that shows the RapidWeaver project file (including the “AirDrop” stack and how it has been configured), and one that shows what the fully rendered page looks like.
I still have quite a bit of work to do. I’d like to add support for displaying photos, formatting numbers and dates, etc. I also plan to add support for specifying the content to display if there is no data available from the database.
In theory, this concept could also be used to publish data from other databases, such as FileMaker.
Thanks again for all of the nice feedback on this.
Tim - this inventive integration into RW is excellent. I’m currently working updating a client’s website and this hook into Airtable would be an excellent choice to display their events schedule on their site. So I understand how the stack would work, would they be able to make the changes on Airtable themselves, and then the results would automatically be displayed on the RW site, is that correct?
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