Rapidweaver Project Size

RapidWeaver Classic General
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I have a genealogy site with over 200 pages. When I first got started with Rapidweaver the site was hand coded, a bit dated, but worked for what we were trying to do. I purchased Stacks very shortly after the purchase of Rapidweaver as I couldn’t find a theme that suited the entire site. When Foundation first came out I purchased that and converted the site over a second time to that.

My problem is the site is becoming quite cumbersome to work on within Rapidweaver. Almost all of the tables use CSV, images are all warehoused. I’ve even tried the embed stack from Instacks’ Repository stack to embed long Markdown articles. I’ve only been able to get individual page weight down to just under 480k after adding the Contents.plist and the PageAttributes. Multiply that times 200 and that’s where my problems start showing up.

Initially the pages were over 500k each. As the site was built with Foundation when it first came out I found the stacks still worked but were Legacy. I converted several of the pages to the newer versions of the stacks and seemed to recover a bit of the page weight. With the number of pages and the work involved to convert them and the fact that with Foundation if I work at converting the site now, I’ve got to do it all over again when the next major update comes out, I decided to do one conversion of the site to Foundry. This has saved me some page weight dropping the project.rw file from 110mb to just under 97mb.

After all that, now to my question. Quite a while back I read an article about breaking up a project into smaller manageable parts. One part of the site, the part that I’m trying to add new pages to, is 40mb in size. If I break this off into it’s own project, building the menu system using Offsite stacks for both projects, under the Advanced section of the General Settings do I leave Consolidate CSS files and Minify CSS and Javascript checked? Also, are there other options I need to enable or disable to make this work?

thanks!

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I’ve invited Greg (@1611mac) to join in on this as if I remember he has broken an enormous RW site into multiple projects.
My question is you mentioned “page weight” and “project file size,” what concerned you?
If your warehousing your images then they will be part of page weight but not as part of project file size.
You said you’ve used Repository stack for long Markdown articles, if they are mostly text, they would need to be gigantic to add much to page weight or project file size.

Perhaps a URL to the site might help.

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My concern is the project size and because of that the possible slowness of Rapidweaver as I add pages. I’ve also read that Rapidweaver may become a touch unstable once I move over the 100mb size. I’ve been using the program OmniDiskSweeper which I use to drill down through the project file. It listed the pages according to size and I’ve optimized those pages with warehoused images, csv tables and such to the point where I haven’t been able to make any further improvements.

I only added the part about how I’d been trying to improve page size/weight in case someone might have been able to point out where I’d missed an opportunity to make the pages smaller.

Can’t see how viewing the site would help but just in case, http://mpsgg.com

I’m in the midst of adding 40 plus pages to the History, Cemeteries section so it seems to me the only way to move forward would be to break up the project file into at least two separate files.

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The reason I asked for a URL as if you were talking about actual web “page weight” then looking at whats on the page can help.

Due to the number of pages, you may want to “break up” your project into smaller sub-projects. Greg, as well as some others, have done this, but navigation, sitemaps etc. would need to be considered.
Looking at the site, not sure what would be causing the project file to explode in size. A simple Foundation or Foundry page with Navigation, site styling stacks, and just some text should only add about 50k or so to a project file. Most of the pages I looked at seem to render at under 1mb.

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Hello… I have a 1500 plus page site (html and php) which is broken up into 8 projects. It sounds like some “tricks” would be needed but RW actually does this with “normal” operation. All you really need do is provide “offsite” plugin nav pages in each project in order to have proper navigation menus.

Page loading, preview and such is great in all projects but a lot of that is due to my installing SSD in my iMac. However, it did work well also without the SSD.

I inherited a really broken site. I converted the whole thing to stacks. The site is largely “reports” (articles), free eBooks and video downloads, and a Store with printed books and paid eBooks.

I can give details a bit later. Sorry but I’m really pressed for time right now.

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@dks035 Any specific questions on setting up multi-project site? I’ve a bit more time today.

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Under the Advanced section of the General Settings do I leave Consolidate CSS files and Minify CSS and Javascript checked? Also, are there other options I need to enable or disable to make this work?

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Those setting won’t effect a multiple project file setup. Though good practice would be to run with both on (my personal belief).

There is nothing special to do to run a multi project site other than to make sure you have your navigation working properly. Each project must have the actual pages or an offsite page for every page you want in your navigation menus.

For example, here is a screenshot of my “Store” project file. Note that “Home” and “Reports” (and their child pages which are on navigation dropdown) and Free eBooks, Free Videos, Friday News, Audio, and Church Dir. are all offsite pages that go to the “index” (navigation) page of that particular section.

Tthe only pages in this project file is the “Store” and “O Timothy” and associated store pages, though the menus will show and function as if the entire site was in this project file.

By the way… Offsite page plugin setup is a bit different between a Parent page and a child page. If you need specifics on this let me know.

Rapidweaver doesn’t really delete anything, so when you upload to your site everything just simply works. For example, the existing rw_common folder DOES NOT get replaced with one for this section only… the info for this section is ADDED TO the rw_common folder (if you know what that is.)

Yes, it is a pain sometimes copying partials, snippets, etc across 8 project files but when you have 1500 pages you have to do something like this. Benefits are that each project file contains only the plugins and partials needed for that section, thus things tend to load, run, and preview faster as opposed to one large site.

And if you lay your site out in a meaningful way… you can update only the part involved.

Of course, you MUST have good knowledge of what changes might affect the whole site vs. just the page or section you are working on.

But I find by far that most of my work affects single pages, thus I use single page publishing a LOT. Very, very rarely do I upload entire “sections” or the entire “site.”

Here the pic of my page pane:

27 AM
27 AM308×559 30.5 KB

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Greg,
I remember you’re using an outside product for the site map, but don’t remember what you’re using?

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I use Zoom Indexer to create my custom search engine and Zoom creates a site map. Zoom runs against the actual site on the server so the entire site is indexed.

There are also many free web tools that will index a site.

However, I have since learned more about sitemaps and you could use the regular RW tool I think if setup properly. Create a sitemap for each section and then manually make a sitemap index file that includes them all. This, of course, would require a bit of manual maintenance.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/75712?hl=en

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Thank you for the assistance. I’ve broken the project up into 3 parts, Published and then I tweaked a couple of links that showed up bad when I ran the Scrutiny app. An option within Scrutiny allowed me to export a sitemap which I also uploaded to the site.

Again, thanks for the help. I was a bit nervous about trying this but everything worked out in the end.

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Something that I think is a bug but I could never get anyone to pay much attention to it…

With the Offsite Page plugin things work differently depending on if it is a Parent page or Child page. I have found that for me, if the Offsite page is a parent page the url used for the page is the one that you enter into the URL of “Offsite Options” (Page Inspector). And I do not tick “Use Redirect Page”. The url entered there is the one that will be used in the nav menu.

However, if the page is a child page (sub-page of another page) and you use the exact same setup the link used in the nav menu is the Folder and Filename set in General Settings… just like normal. So what I do with child pages is to enter a dummy file path and then setup a re-direct in htaccess. IMPORTANT: You can’t use the real Folder and File Name else the real one will be over-written by this redirect page. Again, this is on child pages only.

@dan - Perhaps you could check this out. It would appear to be a bug as I would expect the Child page setup to work as does the parent… that is to say that it should use the Redirect URL and not the one in General Settings.

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