If you want to create a blog-style page and have a need for CMS solutions then Poster is not for you. There’s other products for that: Armadillo, Go CMS, Total CMS, Pulse and others.
However, if you want to create a stylish blog page and want to do so from within RapidWeaver then Poster seems, by far, the best solution. Let me count some of the benefits:
It allows you to fully use your stack library. Have an image/gallery stack you want to use in a blog post? Not a problem with Poster as it is “stack-driven”. Have a table stack you want to use? Again, not a problem.
Recently, Poster added a featured item option. This makes the top post stand out a bit. See screenshot below.
I’ve used Poster for about 6 months, but in relatively light usage for course websites. I’m creating a couple new courses where my usage of Poster is much more intense. I was a little frustrated organizationally as there did not seem to be a way to have draft items: items “ready to go” but that would not show up on the blog yet. … oops, I was wrong. Is should have noticed this before but there’s a very nice tick-box to designate an item “draft”. As important, when that draft tick-box is activated a nice green pencil icon shows up on the relevant posts. Visually it makes is super simple to see which items are published, which are drafts.
I was using the “hide” feature of stacks a lot so I can easily scroll posts in my Poster stack. The problem was I could not tell what each post was about once I hid them. Again, I wished Poster had some sort of collapse feature. And … once again … I was wrong. There’s another tick-box for “hide content in edit mode”. When I use this option all the content is hidden except for the title of the post. Perfect!
In short, even though I’ve been using Poster for 6+ months, I’ve come to appreciate it more and more over time. Lots of nice little features that make a big difference. I can’t provide a link to my course website: it’s password protected. Instead I provide one screenshot of my Poster front page area.
Someone asked me (via private message) to create a tutorial. This is a “quickie” in terms of preparation. 21 minutes long. I hope this is helpful to some, but I definitely left some details out. There’s a lot more good detail at @instacks web page where you can find out more details.
I am trying to put on YouTube. But since the video is longer than 15 minutes, YouTube wants some extra verification from me. I provided my phone number but they never successfully texted me the verification code to use. Thus … I may not be able to upload. Today is a very busy day and I don’t have time to deal with stuff that doesn’t work (YouTube extra steps). If they do come through the video will be posted. But, if they don’t, I don’t have the time to do follow up with them.
Fortunately I think signing up for this “over 15 minutes” permission is a one time thing. In the future the process should be much simpler. I may forget again as I use Vimeo a lot, but with a reminder I’ll be glad to YouTube it as well.
Do it for us handicapped people!