I don’t know why Rapid Weaver does not possess the ability to import sites from the web, especially if those sites were made with RW. For me, this is the most obvious, no-brainer, feature that RW lacks.
It is not uncommon for a developer to lose their project file, their computer, even their backup. The only chance they have to get back to work is to import their site from a host’s server, where it is safely stored and begging to be used again.
If you can not implement importing within RW, why not create a separate utility – just for this purpose? The issue is important enough, to justify such endeavor…
The ability to backwards engineer a page is a non-trivial amount of work. Every plugin would have to somehow know how the data has been exported and retroactively build up a page. It’d need to be maintained across versions, and every single plugin (and stack) would need to support it. And that’s a frankly enormous amount of work across every aspect of the app. Plus, you’d be bound by the exported content. If an image were watermarked, or otherwise edited, there’s no quick and easy way to retrieve the original.
In short: we’ve given it some thought. But the scope is so large that it’s not something we are planning.
If anything, I think @nikf is understating the difficulty. On the other hand, it is really quite simple to recreate a smallish site from scratch. The real answer, of course, is to back everything up so that the project file will never be lost. I use SuperDuper but rwBackup from Stack-Its looks very good.
Is it possible to add a feature to RW that would simply upload a copy of the RW project files to a directory the site is hosted on? Seems that would be the no-brainer.
@thang and @1335Days – I agree with both of you. If it is not possible for RW to import the site from a server, at least it should upload the most current version of the project file together with the exported/published site and then, it should be able to download that specific project file and keep a developer going in case of emergency. That shouldn’t even be difficult to implement, I suppose?
Considering all the added weight of the uploaded/published site, that feature should be made available as an option for RW users (on a project-to-project basis).
I understand, appreciate and use all the workarounds suggested here (backup, TimeMachine, redoing sites from scratch, etc.). They are all more or less doable options. But they will never be of any help, if your computer and backup are stolen (like in this post), or perished in a natural disaster. What if the backup didn’t make it to a cloud or got corrupted? For occasions like those, an additional copy of working project file, safely stored on the server could be the easiest kind of bailout.
Of course, the guy could sit down and try to recreate his site from scratch – I’ve been in that situation before – but this is not a solution, it is simply an act of resignation and a colossal waste of time.
@colorwave – This is great! I wasn’t aware that such thing existed. Exactly for the purpose we were discussing. I checked out the introductory video and it seems to be spot-on. I will get this app for myself. Thanks!