Hi, Everyone:
I’m starting the arduous process of converting some old sites from Rapidweaver 5 to 8. One immediate problem that presents itself is the fact that Rapidweaver 8 can’t seem to find the themes that I used in Rapidweaver 5, some of which I customized. Do I need to move those themes manually? If so, how? Or are some themes used in Rapidweaver 5 just not compatible with Rapidweaver 8, which is a much bigger problem. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
IMHO…heheh…all the themes in 5 are non-responsive and I wouldn’t use them in todays web…start from there.
What theme are you not finding?
Most of the themes for RW5 are going to look very dated by today’s Internet. They aren’t responsive and won’t look good on mobile devices.
Going from 5 to 8 is quite a jump. You’d be better off probably to pick a new theme and start from scratch. You can always copy and paste the content.
The RW 5 themes might not work anyway as I think Realmac has changed a lot in the ways themes are made from 5-8
The modified theme is Dscribe, which I believe is an early Nick Cates design.
I don’t see that one listed on Nick’s site even under legacy.
You might be able to copy the theme over manually, I think you are probably wasting time, as it might not work.
I think the themes are stored in the addons area(not sure on RW5).
https://help.realmacsoftware.com/en/articles/2093782-how-to-manually-install-add-ons
You also need to make sure you follow the steps outlined here, or the project file might not work:
https://help.realmacsoftware.com/en/articles/1905164-upgrading-from-rapidweaver-5-or-6
Thanks for the grim news! 
I looked it up–D Scribe (that’s the correct spelling) is definitely Nick Cates, but quite old (like 2009?). Shifting the topic slightly, if I have to rebuild my sites from scratch, more or less (and since one of them will need to be a CMS of some sort), would it be better to do it in Wordpress like the rest of the world (I don’t know Wordpress, but I guess I could learn), or stick with the current version of Rapidweaver? Opinions welcome!
Wordpress!!!
RW is so much easier…and safer.
It would certainly be very unusual if a theme you were using in RW5 would not be available to use in RW8.
Realmac kept all the RW5 themes in RW8 and they are listed under the RapidWeaver Classic Themes group, in the themes window.
To my knowledge, none of these older themes have been deleted and they do still all work. However they use an older XHTML doctype (not ideal for modern websites, HTML5 is preferred) and they are not mobile responsive.
Having said that, at times, code has been shared on these forums and elsewhere to make old themes better for mobile, so I would not rule them out as completely incompatible with mobile. And indeed, some people still prefer the approach of building separate websites for separate devices - so you might prefer to use one of these classic themes for a desktop site and a different theme for a mobile site. It does happen more often than you might think!
Third party themes like D-Scribe, again, I do not see any reason why these should not work in RW8. As @teefers correctly says, you will probably need to manually copy the theme over to RW8. This can be done by opening your RW5 addons folder (from the menu?) and navigating Finder to find the theme and any other associated files (like saved style sets). Install into RW8 by first copying them to your desktop and then dragging them onto the RW8 dock icon.
The only explanation I can think of for an older third party theme not to work in RW8 could be if the developer set a ‘flag’ by means of a key in the theme.plist file to restrict the theme outside of a certain API range. But I have never seen that done myself, so I’d say that was highly unlikely. We tend to only see this sometimes happen with stacks.
So far as CMS is concerned, how often will you be editing the website and how many people need access? If it is only one or two people occasionally needing to edit some content on an infrequent basis, then one of the free or paid CMS solutions for RapidWeaver should be suffice. If on the other hand the website needs to be edited often and by multiple people, then Wordpress or one of the other mainstream CMS publishing platforms would be a better tool for the job.
It’s more like the one or two people occasionally scenario, so it sounds like Rapidweaver will work. But the burden of modernizing these old sites is daunting, however I do it!
One of the CMS addons for RapidWeaver should work fine for you. Most are listed here:
https://rapidweavercommunity.com/search?q=cms
See if you can demo a few before committing to any particular one. There is a big range in pricing and functionality.
Try your best to get them into RW8 first, together with the themes they were previously using. Once you have websites in RW8 that look similar to what you had in RW5, then your task of updating them will become a lot easier.
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