Thanks Doug, Gary - didn’t know such a product even existed. Looks good!
There are a lot of ‘nice to have’ requests mentioned above that I’d gladly welcome. But my first and foremost request would be to maximize performance on Preview, particularly with Stacks pages. I think working as closely as possible with Yourhead to make sure that RW and Stacks are working optimally is important.
There was a fair bit that I found awkward/limiting when i tested out Blocs, but the preview speed was bananas.
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Before adding new features in RW8 how about fixing the preview in RW7??? It worked fine in RW6, you bring out a paid “upgrade” and for me the preview in RW7 has made it almost unusable. I make a quick change to something and then wait forever to preview it - in RW or in browser.
I’m going to try going back to RW6 and then elsewhere if things don’t improve which would be a shame as the RW community and the stack etc. devs are great.
I’m guessing Realmac have given up on RW7 and that it’s not going to get any better so as far as RW8 goes I wholly agree with Gary Webdeer’s points.
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Hmm. I think Stacks is a major reason for purchasing RapidWeaver in the first place. It’s the rusty cage inside which the colourful bird sings. For RMS to lazily turn round and say “Oh, that Stacks plugin and all those complicated stacks seem to be slowing preview down for that plugin” would be disingenuous to say the least.
RMS should have been all over the internal structures and codebase upon which Stacks runs and making sure, with YourHead, that it is performant. Has that happened? Are there links to review benchmark testing with RW page types? Not that I have seen and I suspect I know why - because a) It probably does not happen and b) They would be poor. I would be surprised if new builds were even fully functionally tested never mind non functionally tested prior to deployment. Just look at the RWS track record for emergency patching in the hours and days post dot version releases.
I also push pages to limits with stacks and custom code and integrations and with the here and now RW7 it’s painful to the point where the time benefits from using Stacks/stacks is diminished against a html template build in VSC/Sublime or even pinegrow or whatever.
I would love to see a Rapidweaver “Stacks Edition” which is properly optimised and performant…
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I believe there is still a great deal to do to RW7 before the next version is released. I’m relieved that the file publishing bug has been investigated and appears to be fixed in the new RW7 beta. But the fact remains that RW7 (with Stacks) is still slower to preview than RW6 for the same project. Why does a 1 character edit on Stacks page take so long to preview? I would hope that these things can be investigated and improved in V7 before time is spent on a new v8.
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If this requires are are big architectural change, this can only be done in v8. But only Dan will know 
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I’d like to see rebuilds of the Magnesium and Web Business themes as responsive layouts - really the only two “old” core RW themes that I ever used (I imagine many others here did as well).
Please add font size control to the bottom panel where the color, bolding, etc. already is. Every time I want to edit font sizes for specific items, I have to right click > fonts > show fonts and then fiddle with the window.
Add support for nested bulleted lists. This is currently broken, where if I indent in two or three levels, it renders the entire trail of bullets behind it.
Also I feel like there has to be a smarter way to handle the “on/off” of the sidebar. It would be great (at least in my use case) if the show/hide of the sidebar lived outside of the master theme. This way I could set everything to the master theme, and then only on the necessary pages hide the sidebar, and not worry about updating multiple styles.
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David,
You may want to check out this free video, it shows you how anything you can do to the master style can be done at the page level.
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Agree with this suggestion whole-heartedly!
Hi Doug,
Thanks! The workflow I am thinking of is as follows:
Let’s say 50% of your site pages have sidebar “On”, the other 50% you need sidebar “Off”
So In my master style, I set sidebar “On”
Then, I move to one of the pages that needs the sidebar “Off” and I uncheck master style and turn sidebar off
I save this as a new style “Master - No Sidebar”
I apply this new style to every page that I need the sidebar off
Now, when later on I say “ok, I need to change these 10 colors across my entire site”:
I first make the changes in the master style
I then need to repeat these 10 changes on one of the non-sidebar pages, and then select to update all pages that have the non-sidebar style applied.
This means that instead of 10 edits, I am making 20 edits.
Not sure if anyone has thought of a better workflow?
There may be a use case where the user wants to flip sidebar on and off instantly across an entire style, but at least in my use case I consider this a page element, like a stack, that I want to flip on/off depending on my page design with a page-level toggle, so that I can just have the Master Style be “set it and forget it”.
To explain the reasoning behind this, I am using dashboard by Nick Cates:
https://nickcatesdesign.com/preview/rapidweaver/dashboard/
As the “sidebar” acts as a very important part of the navigation menu, needing the sidebar depends completely on whether that particular page has any sub-navigation items.
You can save a theme style and reuse it on a different page. The basic video doesn’t cover this.
In your case you would set up one style with sidebar on, and one without. Then in the page inspector you would select the theme style you wanted for that page.
Right near the top of the theme page inspector you’ll see a little gear next to theme style, select and save style.
Not at the Mac at the moment, so can’t give you any screenshots.
There’s a video on it but might be paid.
https://rapidweavercommunity.com/tutorials/theme-customisation
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There’s a section in the RW manual that covers master styles
that would look pretty cool
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You can save a theme style and reuse it on a different page. The basic video doesn’t cover this.
In your case you would set up one style with sidebar on, and one without. Then in the page inspector you would select the theme style you wanted for that page.
Right near the top of the theme page inspector you’ll see a little gear next to theme style, select and save style.Not at the Mac at the moment, so can’t give you any screenshots.
There’s a video on it but might be paid.
https://rapidweavercommunity.com/tutorials/theme-customisation
Hi Doug, thanks again!
You’re right on, that is the workflow I use currently. This issue is that now I can no longer maintain a master style across the entire site simply because I need the sidebar on and off on different pages, and have to ensure I manually double my edits made to the master style to the saved theme style - I am just figuring because a sidebar is more like a page element than it is a style characteristic.
“Hmm, I want to change my link color and hover color.”
Go to master style, change colors.
“Oh right, I need to go edit the non-sidebar style too.”
Go to saved theme, make same edits.
I suppose the validity of this request for RW8 depends on how many others are running up to this in their workflow as well.
Another way to handle it is to create two page styles just using Stacks. Turn the sidebar off for good and then use Stacks and Partials and Two column stacks to create your styles so you can drag and drop them onto new pages as required.
I know some themes have special characteristics for their sidebars that you may want to use but in many cases these would be easy enough to mimic using Stacks.
Rob
That you don’t insist we upgrade to the latest OS.
Apple’s free annual updates are increasingly buggy and I have too much other software that could break.
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I’d like to see buttons / keyboard commands to move stacks/child stacks. For example, to move the selected stack to above the one above it or below the one below it. And for the same stack to stay selected so that you can continue moving it until the desired location is reached (or the top or bottom of the page / parent stack is reached). Clicking and dragging is a pain sometimes and prone to error.
Or if there is a way to do this already i’d be keen to hear it.