Open letter to RealMac/RapidWeaver - RW7 Publishing Issues

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This is an open letter to RealMac/RapidWeaver. Do you have ANY response at all on RW7 and reported publishing problems (local export -or- upload to server.) It has now been 48 hours since I emailed SUPPORT and I have not heard back yet. (My email to you is titled RW7 “Export” not working with Blog (publish take 12 minutes just to export)

I also see several reports of publishing issues here in the forums and I see little to no response from Realmac.

Would it be possible for you (Realmac) to:

  • Respond to my 48 hour old email… even if it’s simply a “sorry, we are busy and it will take a few days to address your support request.”
  • Post to the RapidWeaver forums whether or not you (Realmac) even think you have an export/publish problem or not.

Could you PLEASE communicate with us?

It is my contention that there are some real issues with Publish/Export. What is Realmac’s view?

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Hey guys/gals,

As you can imagine, with the release of Rapidweaver 7 we’ve gotten a larger amount of support emails and we’re working through them as fast as we can.

We appreciate your patience and we hope to get you all back up and running quickly.

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Rather surprisingly since it was so heavily beta-tested, RW 7 does appear to have several major flaws:

• the saving and exporting of Styles not working as expected

• bugs in Preview

• Addons not being brought over to the new location in ~/Library/Containers…

• a bug whereby it’s possible to lose all Addons when a new one is added incorrectly

• a bug which defeats the process to copy Addons after they’ve apparently been moved once, but that process/operation has failed

• a bug which seems to prevent renaming of a Project file in the Finder

• a bug which prepends the string representing the path to the docroot on a remote server to the location in which a local publish takes place, creating nested directories for each element thereof

• a bug which seems to duplicate metatags when entered in Settings when they are already present in a Project

I’m a RW fan and supporter. Have been since version 3. A great community. Hard-working RM staff and extremely gifted and dynamic third party developers. And of course a great community here.

But this collection of malfunctions is actually preventing me (us?) from moving forward with sites. On paper, they’re issues that get commented on, not reproduced by others etc. When trying actually to accomplish something important, and being prevented, they’re very discouraging.

Whilst knowing it’s a busy time, and wishing the new RW 7 enterprise well, it would be nice to know which ways are likely to get which responses from which people within the RM inner circle and which are likely to get these pretty significant flaws fixed, when.

Like many others here, I too have written in and reported these. But too long a time has gone by when they’re not even acknowledged.

I really don’t wish to be negative, or to complain unduly. But we do ourselves no favours by not facing these shortcomings and arranging for fixes.

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RW6 works fine for the most part (FTP issues aside) with El Capitan but any project you work on in RW7 is not backward compatible if you try to open it in RW6.

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I think there is now enough reported evidence here that RW7 has unresolved issues, and that most would realise it very wise to use RW6 until it gets resolved. I am surprised that the issues are mostly Publish related issues considering that the Publish engine was reported as being new. Not being able to go back and use RW6 with an RW file is a potential for lots of tears.

However, there must be a problem with method of beta testing for these issues to get through the beta test process. I reported countless crashes in RW6, publish related and other problems to RM and I was never once contacted and asked to test the next pre release version to confirm that the problem was solved. Instead, I very occasionally got an email stating that the problem was solved in the new version. Those problems, in my experience, remain today after many updates and were never fixed. I can only use RW6 to Export files and then use my own FTP which works very well.

So would it not be a good idea to use a system of testing where the very users who are reporting the problems, are used as the testers to confirm that the problem is cured before releasing a new “fixed” version?. Having 100’s of beta testers is of little value unless they are pushing the boundaries.

I would be very happy to aide in this process and I am sure others here, would also. I sent in a crash report yesterday and cannot get RW7 to successfully publish.

We all want to get this sorted out ASAP.

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RE: RealMac/RW beta testing…
Hi, interesting as I also did RW6 beta testing and had major issues with most all beta versions (repeated would just time out when opening projects) making it completely unusable. It too provided detailed reports, logs, etc but seldom heard back. When I did hear back it would be things like “Please restart your computer” or “Please reinstall…”

RW6 was still completely unusable on my machine when one day I saw it was officially released. My issues had never been resolved. They had hardly even been addressed (communicated about.)

I continued using RW5.3 until just a few weeks ago. With RW7 out I went I decided to move to RW6, which did work for me, but absolutely could not stand the Inspector being locked on the right side. I’m “converting” 780 blog pages into stacks pages and I simply HATED going back and forth from the pages page on far left to the Inspector locked on the far right. Also hated the Meta data setup. So after using RW6 for only a week I made the jump to RW7 purely to get the floating inspector back.

I should have know better.

I don’t believe RealMac has any type of support “tracking” do they? Even some of the 3rd party developers have a ticket system. But with RealMac I believe it’s merely “send an email” with no tracking, etc. If this is correct I think it says something about the support methods. If there is s tracking system then I apologize. But I haven’t seen one and RealMac merely says… send us an email. That gets rather problematic when hundreds (thousands?) of support emails are flying in…

I also ask… Why are design changes made? I can understand the value of having multiple Publishing Locations… But why remove the “export” feature (when right clicking a page.) I use EXPORT a LOT and I just don’t see ANY reason for combining export and publish on a single function and having to set from a pull down. It is too easy to “publish” when you really want to “export.”

anyway… those are just some thoughts this morning… It’s just very frustrating that every time a new version comes out the user productivity goes way day and frustration goes way up.

I won’t be upgrading to RW8 until six months into RW9.

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The issue with going “back” a version is not whether an old file is available, it’s the pulling of all the work and pages created in last week(s) out of the 7 project and into the older 6 project. I work for hours in RW every day, changing, enhancing, adding pages, upgrading pages, making spelling corrections, etc. Once you’ve been doing that for two weeks it’s difficult to give all that up to go back to an old project file in 6.

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Actually, RapidWeaver 7 makes a new project file, leaving the RapidWeaver 6 file alone. This is because the filename has changed from .rw6 to .rw

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Exactly… thus… anything you do in 7 is not in the old 6 project file and if you go back to 6 you need to re-create all that 7 content… right? Or am I missing something big?

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AFAIK as soon as you open a .rw6 project, RapidWeaver 7 creates a .rwcopy, so, unlike previous versions, old project is not overridden with latest changes and you can still open it with RapidWeaver 6.

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True, but at least you can go back to 6 if 7 gives you issues, yes, lost work, but it is there for the option.

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Seriously? I tried opening a 7 file 6 and I get crashes… Seriously?

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That’s correct. So you would loose all changes if you have to go back to RW6.

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What does it mean? I can’t understand.

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Hi rob… you stated a few posts above that you could open a 7 file with 6. I sure can’t.

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They can go back if they are having issues. Not sure why many do not.

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Yes, you are correct that if it doesn’t work go back… but sometimes the severity of problems does not raise it’s ugly head right away. Perhaps it takes a week to realize you made a mistake. You then must re-create a weeks work of work you put in RW7 back into RW6. Giving up a week or two’s worth of work is not that easy to do.

But I agree with you. I should have never gotten into RW7 to begin with. My mistake. I waited into RW7 came out to get RW6. Then I couldn’t stand the fixed inspector on the right so I decided to go ahead to 7 to get the floating pane back… stupid me!

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No, I didn’t.
I said that you can open a RW6 project with RW7. RW7 automatically creates a copy so your RW6-compatible project is not lost.
You should have two projects, one .rw6 project compatible with RW6 and RW7 and one .rw project compatible with RW7.

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My apologies Rob… I misread the above line and thought that very last phrase was in reference to the 7 file opening in 6. My mistake and my apologies for not reading better.

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Floating Inspector in RW6? In fact, RW lists this as “new” enhancement for RW7. This page says “Page Inspector: You can now choose to pop the Inspector out into its own resizable window.”

Sadly, I was given a really, really, bad site to “fix.” Over 1700 pages with no metadata, poor file and folder structure, really really bad file names (used for weighting in my site search tool, zoom) etc. Thus, I spend more time adding/changing meta data, file names, window names, etc as I do actually making pages.

Thus, my life consists of clicking a page and changing the items in the inspector. Having the inspector float on left, right next to the pages on the main window is a big, big, plus for me. Saves time and my mousing wrist.

And the meta data setup in 6 just doesn’t make sense to me. I need to have the meta data pane showing the metadata and be able to just tab thru pages to check the tags. Though I mostly use other tools such as SiteMap Plus and/or MetaMate just to work on meta data.

I am still amazed that RW does not have nice built in tools for doing these types of things. In my opinion the 3rd party developers are the real hero’s of this behemoth.

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