Publishing a project WITHOUT HomePage / Site Index Page

I want to split some of my projects into multiple projects for organizing purposes. For example, I have a main project file and one or more project files with content like promotions or other landing pages.

I want to publish this pages into the main site directory, so they share the same domain, no subdomains or redirect tweaks.

The idea was so setup a RW project, place the landing and promotions pages in there (with their own subfolders), publish them to the server, job done.

However: the Home Page needs to be set and can’t be disabled. So at the end, I overwrite the homepage of the main web presence.

CleanShot 2021-12-27 at 11.05.46

Also changing the folder name of the home page doesn’t work in this case: it’s always published into the root directory.

Pretty sure, I miss something fundamental easy and my brain just doesn’t work properly so close to the end of the year.

Any ideas to archive how to “merge” multiple projects into one site with purely RW?

While posting and thinking, I found a possible solution that seems to work.

While I can’t remove the home page or set the folder name, I can rename the index file of the “sub project” (basic styled text without anything) of the home page to something random. So the original home page is not overwritten

Not 100% how this affects the ressources folder of the main site, but as RW never deletes anything, this should work.

Hmm… And how does Stack merge the files… Not sure if this is a viable solution…

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Name the homepage something like dummy.html in the 2nd project file. As for sitemap, you will need to use a tool like my sitemap stacks in SEO Helper. RapidWeaver will always generate the sitemap.xml from both project files and overwrite the other projects.

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I know Greg @1611mac has a site made of something like 8 project files using stacks pages.

As for sitemap, look at something like Integrity Plus (peacockmedia.software). ($15)

It will work with any site not just RapidWeaver, and it will also make sure you don’t have any broken links.

It also will add generated pages (like Poster 2, Armadillo, etc.) to the xml sitemap.

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Not sure what your goal is or why but I’ll just throw this in…

I maintain a site of over 2200 html/php pages (pages reported indexed last time I ran Zoom Indexer). It’s broken down into several project files. Some thought has to go into the setup. I was forced to do this because of the size of site. If you don’t have to do it I don’t recommend it unless you want to use RW in an unconventional way. All links must be true urls, you cannot Consolidate CSS files, you must be careful if you make changes to Themes and theme styles or your pages wont be the same, Etc. My advice would be… If you don’t have to do it, don’t. Use RW the way it’s intended.

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Thanks, Joe.
Lucky me, for the “external” maintained pages, I don’t need a sitemap and links use a different tracking code (as per project / landing)

@1611mac I don’t believe I would use RW for this sort of large projects. With my current use case, the themes are not an issue (all Foundry based) but you’re totally right: this can end up in a mess.

@dripple
i have a “similar” problem with one of my projects and have solved this with this quick and dirty solution…

  1. split the projects (for each subdirectory)
  2. Right Klick on the subdirectory you want publish
  3. Click Publish Page
  4. Choose if you want to publish the single page or the whole directory

with this way you can prevent the “start page” from being published


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I totally forgot about the Publish Page function… Head->Wall :see_no_evil:

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