I built this 6 o so years ago. My main beef with it is the slow loading, which is probably because I relied on Blocks within Blocks to get what I wanted. I’ve purchased RW 6 and I am hoping that using Stacks instead of Blocks will help. I like a lot of Nick Cates plugins, and plan on trying Light Page and Rails to simplify things and keep it to one page.
Hope I can customize the navigation buttons in Rails.
Most of my clients just want to see my portfolio of work, (I am a deck and porch builder), so the easier to navigate the gallery, the better.
Fast loading and easy thumbnail navigation are my wishes. I will customize the look in Stacks, (I hope).
With all that in mind, if anyone has any thoughts, I’m all ears.
I had a look at your site using Inspect Element (Safari Dev tools) and noticed that several of your images through the site are referenced multiple times on the same page with different filenames (Possibly a RW 4 issue, I don’t go that far back).
This will definitely slow your site down as it is calling each image multiple times per page (Nav button curly thingy as an example).
I think yo’ll be happy with Nick’s designs and stacks. His Open Theme with Production stack don’t play nice together but other than that, haven’t had any issues. Elixir Graphics is another great designer of Themes as are many other Theme Developers. Just be aware that not all stacks work with all Themes going in and be prepared to buy a duplicate of a stack by a different developer should you encounter any issues.
Blocks from YourHead Software was last updated 2014 so perhaps the new version will work better for you in RW6.
Pretty tough upgrade process from 4 to 6, be prepared to go hunting for RW V6/Stacks V3.0.5 capable versions of your purchased stacks and Themes…
Thanks Brad, ya I was already resolved to the fact that I would be starting from scratch with my old plugins. Thanks for the tips on the multiple items being referenced. There are many coats of paint on the old girl. When updating over the years, sometimes I stripped it down to the bare wood, and sometimes I just added more paint!
