Is RapidWeaver Classic nearing end-of-life?

RapidWeaver Classic
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I looked at the site (and the original poster says no Stacks were used) and would agree: it should be relatively easy to move from RapidWeaver to Elements. I didn’t see anything on the site that would constrain that.

The problem many face—and this has been basically true of every major change in Web publishing to date—is that the UI and specific tools change. This requires that you re-center your thinking to the new UX, and that’s not always obvious. I would say that a move from RapidWeaver to Blocs or Sitely would actually be more difficult because of this (at least Elements will inherit the structure and some components).

That said, we certainly need more examples with clear explanation of how to move from RapidWeaver to Elements.

I can tell you how I’d approach moving that site to Elements (assuming that you take the time to learn Elements, at least at a solid basic level):

  1. Collect all the visual assets (JPEGs, logos, etc.) into a folder. You’ll eventually move those into Resources in Elements.
  2. Run MarkDownload on every text page (not the blog) on the site to collect Markdown versions of the text.
  3. Use the built-in RapidWeaver-to-Elements beta to transfer the structure and as much of everything as possible.
  4. Use a Markdown Component for all those text pages, and copy in what you did in Step 2.
  5. Move the visual assets you collected in Step 1 into Resources, and then add them in, as necessary (this may require editing Markdown, as some are embedded).
  6. Figure out how you’re going to do the “blog.” I put that in quotes because this actually appears to be an outside feed, not a site-contained blog, so there’s likely some HTML code in the original site that’s doing that. That should transfer over by creating an HTML Component and copying the code, but I didn’t look to see exactly what was going on).

The biggest issue I see is that a lot of the images are embedded with text wrap. This requires some knowledge of Tailwind/Twig to accomplish. I tend to avoid that at the moment, as it complicates responsive design things, so I’d be using flexes to isolate image from text.

But I understand the OP’s concerns. It is a learning issue moving from one idiom to another. However, once you fully make that leap, it is easy to develop and maintain a site in Elements. And less limiting.