Question on Robust-ness of RW & integrations

Hello,
My first post here.

Just today found out I’ve been totally scr*wed by Adobe as they are discontinuing their Business Catalyst platform (effective immediately) and I have membership site with 80 pages including a forum, classifieds, e-commerce store, and user/member video & photo upload pages, as well as calendar of events page. BC has/had a great CRM and stats package in the backend - and email campaigns were all integrated with that.

Can Rapid Weaver handle these elements? Are there extensions or integrations that can handle portions of this.

I am soooo- upset - any advice / reccos on a possible platform replacement are greatly appreciated. Thank you. Mickey.

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Hey Mickey,

It sounds like you’re in good company – Adobe seems to have really cut off a lot of customers.

The good news is that RapidWeaver is super easy to use and super extensible – so there’s a huge community of add-on developers building plugins, themes, and stacks that add pages to build just about anything you need.

My recommendation:

  1. Download RapidWeaver – you can try it out for free – so no reason not to:
  2. Download Stacks – also a free trial and a great way to get lots more power out of RapidWeaver
  3. Check out the community area for lots more good stuff to build your site: https://rapidweavercommunity.com

Isaiah

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I have already chatted with a few other Muse user’s today about moving to RapidWeaver. RapidWeaver is a very powerful platform with a plethora of wonderful add-ons. I am happy to spare a few mins and setup a quick video chat with you if that would help.

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Thank you Isaiah! I welcome the encouragement.

Question: In your experience with RW and the myriad of extensions - is there a lot of fade-out? for example do developers of the extensions come and go? I’m nervous to build on a platform, use a collection of plug-ins/ extensions and then have to constantly update, and change things as one extension fails to be upgraded by the developer, etc…
Than you again.

Thank you Joe. In your opinion what is the advantage of RW over say, Wix, Joomla or Wordpress?

Any environment that you go into will have some turnover. New developers enter the space, some stick and some will not. There are a large number of developers that form a nice backbone to the community though. There are a large number of developers that have been here for 10+ years. Let me try to list them for you (sorry if I miss anyone :grin:) @isaiah @joeworkman (me) @tav @nickcates @Elixir @yabdab @Doobox @barchard @MultiThemes @willwood

As you see that is a lot of developers that have been here a long long time.

Let start off by saying that I have never used Joomla, so I cannot speak of that.

I have never used Wix however, despite all of the advertisements that they do, I have heard some really bad stories about them. I have also seen some of the worst websites known to man built with them. Besides all of that, I think that building a website where you own the content is important. If you use Wix, they have control over everything. If you host with RapidWeaver or the other software that you mention, you can easily move to a new hosting company if you see fit. All it would take is the click of a button with RapidWeaver.

Wordpress… oh boy. You can build some amazing things with Wordpress. There is a large and thriving ecosystem of developers. Its so large that it could be difficult to decide which sub-ecosystem you want to work in within the overall Wordpress environment. This is why I personally dont like Wordpress. OK, maybe I hate Wordpress… :wink:

  • I dont find it pleasant to use at all. Now granted, I have not tried some of the more modern frameworks. However, Wordpress was built to be a blog, then they tried to smash everything else under that umbrella. Its like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. It may be a personal choice but I really don’t see any joy in using the product at all.
  • Since Wordpress is so large is is under constant attack. This means that you have to worry about your site getting hacked. You will be spending a lot of time upgrading and applying security patches (which could break plugins). Or paying someone to handle that for you. That does not sound fun to me…
  • Wordpress sites are a lot slower than sites built with RapidWeaver. RapidWeaver is essentially a static site generator. There are ways to bring in dynamic content and blogs. But even with those, I have found RapidWeaver to beat the performance of Wordpress sites that I have seen.
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I could make a much better living if I developed Wordpress plugins. No doubt. But I don’t because I love Rapidweaver and truly feel that it’s the best way to design a webpage. It’s fun too! :grin:

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Thank you all for the input. I value the concept of owning my content and not being be-holdin to a large corporation’s whims (again). That said I am far from a hard-core coder and run several businesses, so do not have time for steep learning curves.
I must say the community here is quite compassionate and that is not as common a thing as it ought to be. Thanks.

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That’s another thing to consider Mickey - the community around RW is friendly, supportive and genuinely helpful. A lot of the people who hang out here are still enthusiastic about the product - as well as using it to build their own sites and sites for other people.

Rob

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hello @Mickey, @robbeattie and @joeworkman, you pundits are absolutely right about supporting rapidweaver wholeheartedly. i am all with you on that! i have to work both systems - rapidweaver and wordpress (some clients insist on it but than never ever do get involved with changing things themselves) - and wordpress is a bit of a pain. the other day my internet was down - well no dice working on some site lest you go to MAMP!
rapidweaver is the way to go!
greetings,
tomas

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RapidWeaver is actually fun to use.

Wordpress isn’t fun and good luck getting a site to look the way you want unless you’re a coder.

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Hey Mickey!

There is a bit of a learning curve with Rapidweaver. That being said, once you’ve mastered the curve, it all connects. With your experience building other sites, it may be easier on you than it was on me.

I came to RW from iWeb 11 years and I still buy from the same developers I did in those early days. I can’t say how many sites I’ve built, probably over 25, but any time I needed to add a capability, there was a stack out there to make it happen.

Hope to see you around!

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