RapidWeaver 6.3 Beta 2

Hi Guys

With RW 6.2.4 out the way, we’re focusing on RapidWeaver 6.3. This is a new feature update that we’re aiming to launch later in the summer. Our focus is on making RapidWeaver even more useful and reliable, with FTP uploading and other areas of the app seeing some new changes!

New in RapidWeaver 6.3 Beta 2 (Build 14958)

Changes between the previous beta and this beta are noted in bold.

Features

  • Significant updates to RapidWeaver’s publishing feature.
    • RapidWeaver now supports a wider range of FTPS authentication options
    • Updated to the latest version of the cURL library to improve the reliability of uploads.
  • Unique description metatags are now generated in the Blog plugin to improve your blog’s SEO.

Enhancements

  • RapidWeaver now remembers your Preview scroll position when switching a page between Edit and Preview.
  • Fixes a problem in the Photo Album page where the page title would incorrectly be shown in gallery pages.
  • Fixes an issue where the Email Address field in the Site Setup would not be disabled when the Footer was disabled.
  • Fixes a crash when attempting to preview a project with a malformed theme.
  • Fixes a crash when dragging resources between RapidWeaver projects.

Download RapidWeaver 6.3 Beta 2

If you’re happy with the risks associated with using pre-release software, you can grab a download here.

If you run into any issues, please let us know here (or via email).

—Nik

3 Likes

Nick:

How about a fix so that when you add a Stack or do editing to a Stack or moving a Stack, that the Edit page does not automatically bounce up to the top of the page so we than have to scroll back down to where we were?

Thanks.

Neil

Hi Neil

We don’t develop Stacks: this is something you’d need to request from YourHead, the developers of Stacks about this. As I recall, the behaviour is possibly related to a case where the HTML for a page is incomplete, so the page has a problem rendering it consistently. @isaiah can probably clarify that.

Thanks,

—Nik

Thanks Nick. Didn’t realize this was a Stacks issue. Hopefully Stacks 3 will address the issue unless it’s just something I’m messing up.

Neil

In all seriousness: drop YourHead Software an email. They’ll be able to confirm the source of the issue (and if it’s what I believe the issue is, help point you in the right direction).

—Nik

Thanks again for your help.

Neil

@neilcovert someone asked about that over on this topic: http://community.realmacsoftware.com/t/jumping-to-the-top-of-the-page/789

it’s off topic for the RW beta – so i’ll just let you read/post over on that other thread. if you need any help with that, contact our support folks, we can help!

Isaiah

My one and only real problem with Rapidweaver at this point is that I still see frequent spinning ball when saving or exporting a project after even a few changes and it’s been like this since the very first release version of RW6. Switching from Edit to Preview used to be bad as well but is slightly improved now. My computer is a few years old now but it’s an 8 Core Mac Pro with 32 gigs of ram that should handle these things with ease.

I recall that the late betas of 6.2.3 suddenly lost all the spinning ball and then when the final version came out it was back. 6.2.4 or 6.3 beta 1 are no better.

I sent Realmac the project file some months back to examine and I gather some 3rd party stacks developers were putting excessive strain on some part of the Stacks Api. When I tried a Stack 3 beta last week this problem was still present. I’m using Foundation but I’ve also seen this with a couple 3rd party themes.

None of this makes RW unusable but it’s the only application on my computer that sees regular spinning ball and slightly tarnishes an otherwise polished performer. I did wonder if fitting an SSD might help and I plan to do that in the near future anyway but it shouldn’t make a difference if I am just using normal drives. I don’t see any of this with Photoshop, Lightroom or exporting HD video, even if they are all in use at the same time.

Incidentally RW still tells me I need to save a project every time before exporting, even if I saved it a few seconds before and made no changes.

Does this happen even in a simple, single-page project with one of the built-in plugins?

I had never tried that before because I’ve always worked with stacks, so I just created a quick test project. I added a simple blog page with 3 entries that were only a line each. Then I added a contact form. The first time I saved the project to the desktop I had about 4 seconds of spinning ball but subsequent saves following small changes seemed OK. I only tried this for a few minutes though and there were no images so it was a super light project.

I sent in my project file some months ago to be checked and I believe a problem was identified where a certain part of the Stacks Api was being overburdened, which caused spinning ball. The only solution was for developers to change their ways or for an update to the Stacks Api that would provide some extra leeway, so I had been hoping Stacks 3 would be the solution. I believe you may have contacted a developer at the time about this strain on performance.

My main project is not big by any means. It’s about 11 pages and only one or two of those have any number of Jpegs. I just tried exporting the project to a folder and RW insists on saving a project (even with no changes) before doing so. I timed the spinning ball at 10 seconds before it began to export.

One other small request. If you export a project that uses Global Content a warning pops up every time saying it could not preview something or other. This becomes a bit tedious after a while and I wish it could be disabled.

How / Where do you access the blog post meta description field in v6.3b2? This feature is sooooo long overdue and critical for good on-page SEO.

I’m still transitioning from v5 to v6 - Is/Was there a 3rd-party plug-in that gives blog entries a unique description?

RapidWeaver generates the description field from the content of your blog post. It is not directly editable. Simply ensure you have a description tag set for the blog itself, and on individual pages the Javascript will trigger to change it (N.B. Google does now process JS on pages, hence why we can offer it this way).

—Nik

1 Like

This is likely due to Quick Look generation. We’ll look at making it something you can toggle off if you so desire :smile:

—Nik

I think this may be improved when Stacks 3 is released. Isaiah studied my project file recently and apparently it’s a good example of a small project that takes a performance hit in Rapidweaver due to Quick Look generation with a complex stacks arrangement in place.

I do remember that switching from Edit to Preview became remarkably faster with 6.2 but there has typically always been a delay when saving files. It’s basically a few seconds of spinning ball before it starts to save.

Ok - so the custom blog post description you’re generating is HIDDEN inside Javascript ‘somewhere’? Does that mean the only way to view it is to wait for the search engines to crawl it - and verify the results in SERP listings? I’ve republished my blog and still don’t see unique post descriptions when I View Source in my browser.

EXACTLY how / where is it getting the custom generated description text from? The first sentence(s) of the post? Randomly? A mash-up of H1/H2/Header / Category / Title info?

If you’re simply viewing the page source, then you won’t see the description. If you switch to “DOM Tree” instead of “Source Code” in the Web Inspector, you’ll see the changes reflected. The description for individual articles is the first ~150 characters of the blog post itself. For other pages, it’s descriptive of the content (“Archives for July 2014”, for example).

Files not marked as published,

Every time I publish it now needs to publish 300-400 files. It seems not to mark the files as having been published and leaves a dot beside most of them. I tried “mark all files as changed” but then it just republished only 428 files (I think there are more than 2,000) and still left most marked with the changed dot.

Next I will try “Re-Publish all files”

Thx Nik

We’re looking into this.

—N

2 Likes

Hi Guys

Just a quick note to let you know RapidWeaver 6.3 is now available via the Release Notes page, and via Check for Updates!

—N