I have two old websites, but want to move all to RW. How do I go about it? It doesn’t want to open any of the web pages.
You can not “import” a website into RW. You can however, cut and past the contents of a web site into a new RW project.
Same problem here plus I’m completely new to RapidWeaver. I have an existing website which I would now like to edit. I have access to the backend on the host server. Where can I get a basic guide to editing the existing site in RW?
The site is moderately large and the thought of cutting and pasting hundreds of pages and files could easily drive me mad. Any help will be appreciated.
Hi John(@seadog) and Welcome to the forum,
Just a heads up, you are replying to a 4-year-old post. It’s probably best to start a new post when the only thing you find is that old. Many times the releases and software may have changed quite a bit in 4 years.
Now in this case nothing really has changed. There is no way with RapidWeaver to take an existing site and create a project.
So unfortunately it’s copy and paste. If the existing site uses a lot on resources like images, you might find it easier to use a product like sitesucker. It will not make a project file for you, but will “grab” erverything from the existing site and put them on your local machine.
Thanks Doug ( Teefers) for quick response and will do as you recommend re not replying to an old topic in future.
The website edits I need to make are actually fairly limited, in that only a few of the pages will be subject to changes. If I download the site using sitesucker, can changes then be made to the HTML page files using RapidWeaver? Or can I use RW to replicate the HTML pages to be edited (by copy & paste) and then upload those to the site server? In other words, are pages created in RapidWeaver compatible with existing pages which I think were made using DreamWeaver?
RapidWeaver really isn’t an HTML editor. Technically, you can add HTML pages to a project, or add HTML to a page, but it’s not really the way it works.
RW is a tool that generates websites. They base it on a project file. The project file contains different plugins (page types). It generates the HTML (or PHP), CSS, and Javascript needed to produce a website for previewing and publishing. You really don’t edit the code that it generated yourself.
RapidWeaver is theme based. You choose a theme that contains the most of the styling and standard stuff like navigation. There are what we call Frameworks, that all use the most popular 3rd party plugin called stacks. Frameworks use a specific blank theme (frameworks use a theme and stacks designed to work together). The frameworks come with stacks that allow you to build a page/site from scratch, pretty much anyway you like.
You can use stacks with conventional themes as well.
Now, in your case where you have an existing site built with another product(DreamWeaver), there is no automatic way to take the native code (HTML,PHP,CSS and Javascript) and make it into an useable RW project file.
You would need to manually copy and paste each page’s content into a new RW project file. Sitesucker probably wouldn’t help much other than it does separate things like images into a folder for you.
Technically, you could take the Raw HTML and CSS and recreate the pages with a HTML page type in RW, but it’s not a strong HTML editor and you would need to know how to code which kind of defeats the purpose of using a product like RapidWeaver.
Doug, that’s all a big disappointment, but thanks for your explanations. Because of the similarity in the names, my fault for assuming RapidWeaver would do roughly the same job as DreamWeaver did. Apart from that, nothing lost. RW was packaged with other applications. It wasn’t the reason for buying the package but it will teach me not to make too many assumptions! Still, it is a pity, it would have solved a small problem I have.
Thanks again for your speedy response and expert advice.
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