I am considering RW over my current PC authoring tool (X5). (I run both Macs and PCs)
X5 claims “unlimited pages” in a project but I seem to have broken the limit at 1140 pages where the software no longer can upload to the server (it builds “plugins” for each page, and each plugin has objects in it for each object on the built page). X5 support has been working on the problem for over 3 months and are unable to suggest a work around or a fix so far. Then they revised their page limit to 10,000… and I reminded them that 1140 is still less than 10,000…
X5 is also a huge upload as the entire project is uploaded for even a minor change on a page, such as a text typo. (I see with RW you can do an individual page upload…?)
My main question: Is there a limit to the number of pages in a project? I estimate my project will top out at around 2000 when completed. Each product we make has its own landing page - containing descriptive text, photo, cart button, pdf catalog page link.
There isn’t a limit to the amount of pages you can create in RapidWeaver, as in we don’t impose some kind of limit in the code or anything.
With the above said, there are some best recommendations when building large websites with RapidWeaver.
If your website is going to be resource heavy (images, videos, PDFs, etc.) it’s recommended to store those resources on an external server instead of adding them to the project file. For example you could host your resources on something like Amazon S3 (or any other S3 compatible storage solution). This prevents your project file from growing in size from a few MB to multiple GBs which makes it easier to work with and helps mitigate instability.
Our third-party developer community is awesome and makes some amazing addons for RapidWeaver. Using addons enhances what you are able to do with RapidWeaver so depending on your needs it can be worth picking up the things you need. Try to avoid adding in things you don’t really need though. The more addons you add to RapidWeaver, the more complex you make the project file and the more risk that some addons won’t play nice together and cause instability with the project. Try to keep the project as lean as possible and use only what you need to build your site.
Depending on how spec’ed out your Mac is, when working with very large projects, we generally recommend not opening too many other apps on your Mac. For example if you are using an Intel Mac that only has 8GB or RAM, and a low level Intel graphics card, we wouldn’t recommend having tons of apps open at the same time as RapidWeaver (for example Chrome browser with a few tabs open, any Adobe product, and any other resource intensive app). On the other hand if you are on a Mac Studio that has an M2 Ultra chip with 60+ GB Ram and high CPU/GPU cores, then you should be able to have some other resource intensive apps running.
We anticipate with the launch of RapidWeaver Elements, we will be able to better mitigate and respond to reports of project instability. I don’t say this to discredit any third-party plugin, but as someone who can see the crash reports that are submitted as well as the support tickets that users submit, 90%+ of crashes and project instability involve the Stacks plugin, usually when a large number of stacks are mixed and matched in the project. We are hoping RapidWeaver Elements will solve this problem for our user base as we will be the ones writing/developing the code from top to bottom and will be able to better respond to and fix any problems our users come across.
Hope that helps, if you have any other questions just let us know.
Regarding pdf’s; currently I use an iframe to show the pdf, so the user can view it without leaving the page (and there is also a download link). All pdfs are referenced to a separate folder in the public_html server folder which holds all of the pdf’s. So a similar strategy would be ok?
just so you can see what i would be trying to reproduce:
All pdfs are referenced to a separate folder in the public_html server folder which holds all of the pdf’s. So a similar strategy would be ok?
Yep that would work. As long as the PDFs are being stored directly on your server and linked to in your iframe code instead of being dragged into RW’s resources, they wouldn’t increase the size of your project file.
