What can Rapidweaver not do? Just pure curiosity. It’s great fun to use and much easier to get great looking results than any other I’ve tried, so what could it not do?
Could the Apple website be created/recreated in RW for example?
That depends on what you are willing to learn… since you can use html, if you want to, that means that “Rapidweaver” can do anything. You can use html/css code/snippets… php add-ons (scripts), 3rd party items (carts, etc) and such. But it’s power is what you can do from “standard” RW plugins and stacks. I wouldn’t even consider using it without Stacks add-on and learning as much about Stacks as I could.
Here is a recreation of the Star Wars website using Foundation. Done by @j303, very nicely done. I thought there was someone over on Joe’s Community that built an Apple recreation with Foundation, but I can not find it when I search.
EDIT - WHOOPS, forgot the link to the Star Wars site:
https://www.easthalldesign.com/letsbuild/starwars/
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Here is another one by @j303 but is an older Apple site. Again, made with Foundation.
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My Project13 demo Project is quite similar to the current Apple home layout - Webdeersign RapidProject 13
If you remove the width control, i.e. remove the content width control to go full width (easy), use a 2 column layout instead of 3, set the main rectangles to match the Apple dimensions, then you are pretty close to the Apple layout.
There is nothing difficult in the current site that I don’t think RW with Stacks, a selection of BWD stacks and a blank theme, foundry or Foundation could not do.
If you are asking if RW on it’s own can build the Apple site then no. You need Stacks and lots of stacks.
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RW goes beyond the extent of my knowledge or imagination. I just wondered where the limitations were ie e commerce/cms etc, or can we do pretty much anything on any scale?
Wait until Total CMS 2 that is coming out, that will blow you away what you can do with RapidWeaver.
To be honest, I don’t really understand what Total CMS does that Armadillo doesn’t. I think that’s possibly an issue with a lot of add-on developers. There’s an assumption that your customers are cleverer than we are. Some might be, but I do see a lot of stuff that’s way over my head.
I have never dived into Armadillo, even though I bought it, so I really couldn’t be the one to tell you what one can do over the other either way. I just know that Total CMS 2 will change the way a LOT of people make sites. Especially online store sites.
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Is that a hint that it will have it’s own store, or that it will integrate with other cart systems?
Amazing! I just finished Nick Cate’s The secret behind Apple’s winning homepage video series and that said layout were pointed out and I was pondering how to implement that with RW. @webdeer what you say, by purchasing your project 13 I could have copy paste solution for another project? If that shameless approach is not frowned upon.
Not a shameless approach at all and probably what the Apple web folk do too.
Yes, all of my Projects and Templates are designed to copy and paste sections into other projects or start with the Project and then delete what you don’t want and reorder and move sections around as desired.
This is exactly how I work everyday by copying sections from designs I have created and found this to be a far more productive and creative way to build sites. Starting with a blank page is a real creative process killer and having to add everything into a blank page from scratch and preview, test, adjust, preview, etc adds a great deal to the time needed to build a site.
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Not a popular view, but it all depends on how much money you want to spend.
RW per se, does very little. The themes and plugins do the heavy lifting and they are not included with RW (some thmes are). Most of the above comments are not RW on it’s own but other paid plugins, CMSs or themes. Most need to be paid for. I’ve spent hundreds of pounds over the years buying plugins and stacks. And there is quite a market for these and developers making their living off them.
RW does not allow more than one dev editing the same site (unless you happen to have exactly the same plugins installed. I’m still not sure it would work well even if you had.) which is why there are CMss such a Total CMS and Armadillo and Pulse. These can cost you hundreds of pounds a year to use depending on the number of domains.
RW is a powerful platform, but RW by itself won’t achieve a great deal. However, if you have the financial resources you can extend RW by buying stacks and different stacks and plugins and themes, to your hearts content and achieve almost anything, but it will cost.
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I think that’s a fair view.
Would you suggest that RW does not therefore represent good value for money for a really big project?
I think that’s too vague a question.
Type of project, technology requirements, how many people working on the project, is it a project you will maintain or hand over and questions like this need to be answered first. Although RW plugins and themes cost, many of them are inexpensive. The bigger hurdle with RW is if you need to hand on the project for someone else to maintain, that for me is always RW’s greatest weakness. You can get third party plugins to work around it, but creating a project in RW that can then be handed on with no need for RW would be difficult to achieve. In a way RW projects are locked into RW. Of, course so are Wordpress sites and a plethora of other systems.
This is a valid point if you want to hand over the entire design maintenance of the site to the client. However, I see that many are having success with Total CMS since they can do so much with it, the client has control over almost all aspect fo the content. And even control over a lot of design concepts as well. This will be even more prevalent in Total CMS 2.
There are a number of CMS plugins you can use, but then you begin to move your site away from RW as the CMS begins to take over control. This is not a bad thing especially if you need to edit your site outside of RW, but this also adds to the cost of running your site as you need to pay for the CMS as well.
In the end you need to weigh up the cost, which takes things back to where I entered this discussion. What is your budget?
I started out with Wordpress years ago and it was great. Then security became an issue and I moved away from it. Now that CMSs are more or less essential if you want some sort of blog functionality (which I find most sites I build do), I’ve started to move back towards Wordpress. The reason is that although Pulse, Armadillo and Total CMS exist, they are not as mature as Wordpress. I’ve also found that these have become expensive to use very quickly and there’s a lock in once you use them that you have to pay for each new release especially if you want to keep it secure. By lock in I don’t mean you are forced to keep your data there, but there is the inevitable hassle of migrating data elsewhere. I’ve found RW fitted well for hobby/small sites, but my experience with business sites is somewhat different. You can buy a whole bunch of plugins to create any sort of site. However, plugins also disappear. Once you purchase a stack, there’s no guarantee how long it will be developed and as the developers need revenue, new stacks appear and old ones are not developed further. Managing stacks and plugins is more painful as Wordpress was to manage with updates (which is now automatic in Wordpress). So there’s no gain here with RW. In terms of pure cost it ended up cheaper for me to buy a lifetime licence for Elegant Themes and use their Divi theme plus a licence for Bulletproof Security plugin to secure my Wordpress installations. Divi has most of the functionality I need for most sites so I’m not loading lots of plugins. Plus it frees me from the RW single site editor/updater situation and enables me to be able collaborate on projects more easily. I know many people slate Wordpress, but it’s ubiquitous. Easily installed in any cPanel, simple enough to set up local dev installations.
I really liked RW in the early days, but have found that as time has gone on there are too many moving parts, that all need managing and need to play nice together. Using Wordpress has massively reduced my costs for creating a site and once you get to know how it works, development moves faster. As many of my clients want some sort of blog included with their site, RW was really dead in the water. Clients cannot create posts without some work around. Plus RW made the decision not to develop their blog engine, which was a real shame and short-sighted in my opinion as blogs are so central to the internet.
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Getting back to the original question, functionality not a chance. Take a good look at just some of the links in the footer, and what they do and there’s nothing like that available. Things like:
- Support knowledge database, with it’s integrated search function.
- Schedule service.
- Online chats.
- Schedule a automatic support call back.
- Schedule an appointment at any Apple store.
- Manage millions of people’s Apple ID’s including Two-factor authentication.
- iCloud,com
- Etc. etc.
Large-cap companies like Apple, large banks, big retailers and more have sizable IT departments, with ample budgets. They’ll have teams of developers, analysts, data security administrators, DBA’s, marketers, copy writers and testing teams.
They’ll have multiple developers working on multiple projects at the same time. RapidWeaver can only get as big as a single developer can handle, there’s no version control built in, so it would make it impossible too manage more than one person working on a project at a time.
Now if the question is could RapidWeaver make a site that kinda looks like the sales part of Apples website, the answer would be yeah kinda.
RapidWeaver was designed for smaller websites, and does a pretty good job on them. Some folks push the threshold and find work ways around that design, but it’s always easier to pick the right tool for the job you’re going to do.
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This is something that most web designers would absolutely not want to do for the following reasons:
- Clients almost never have a clue what looks right and many struggle with spelling and capitalisation for simple text. Giving control over main images will end in tears in my experience.
- The web designer needs to maintain design control to preserve their reputation, to make the site work and also as an ongoing source of income.
Ask any normal customer if they want to edit all content and they will say yes. Doesn’t mean you have to do it. Keep life simple and use CMS for data and price changes and also announcements and use a simple blog.
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Thanks for such a detailed and thorough answer.
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