Hi Rapidweaver Community,
I have taken the plunge to create my own blogging website on Rapidweaver. I am currently using the wordpress.com platform and find their themes very bland. Is there a way to create everything on Rapidweaver and map the website to wordpress.com? Do i need to be on a business plan?
Your help will be greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Dino
Hi Jannis thank you for this. Could you explain how this works? I’m new to Rapidweaver. Thank you
I don’t agree that WP themes are bland - plenty of very good ones! However, combining Wordpress and Rapidweaver is a long winded way of doing things even though Yabdab’s stack is bound to be very good. If you are the sole editor of your blog, why not build it in RW, edit it within RW and save yourself all the security issues WP hosting throws up. You can use the built in blog - which is fine but a bit dated - or maybe try the Poster Stack from instacks - which is highly thought of and also useful for other things.
Welcome!
I’m going to +1 @manofdogz, the YabDab plug-in is a great way to pull in your blog, especially if you have a ton of content. You can use it with the free version of WP. My only suggestion is to change your WP privacy settings after you publish your new RW site to make sure Google doesn’t index the WP site.
I’d also agree that, were I in your shoes, I’d build whatever other pages you have on your site using Stacks. It’s the cornerstone of our community. There is a stack for pretty much any functionality that you could want on your site.
There is a learning curve with RW, but tons of helpful people here in the forums. Once you’ve mastered the basics, you’ll be amazed at how much you can do!
For themes, I’d send you to @nickcates over at Nick Cates Design. I’ve used his themes for over 6 years and they are awesome to work with.
Best of luck!
Thank you for your advice. I will look into the Poster Stack and see how I can work around it. I want to create a shop on the blog too and find wordpress plans to be quite expensive. What is a good stack for commercial purposes?
Thank you for your message Chet. This is my first time on rapidweaver and already made significant grounds. I’m trying to understand what are the most essential stacks for me to start off. I’ve seen Foundation and Stacks 3 and looks like a powerful combination.
The themes @nickcates looks awesome and will heavily consider this.
I’m really overwhelmed by the support shown by the RW community and appreciate the advice given!
If you’re looking for something that covers all the bases, works out of the box - and look excellent, I strongly recommend either my Royale or Marvel theme bundle deals. These include Velvet (for video), and Photo (for photos galleries). Scroll to the bottom of these links.
Marvel: https://nickcatesdesign.com/preview/rapidweaver/marvel/
Royale: https://nickcatesdesign.com/preview/rapidweaver/royale/
I also provide downloadable project files with these two themes as well! Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help with 
Thanks for the shout Chet!
Hi Dino, jut to clarify, if you use Rapidweaver, you don’t need Wordpress.
I’m not sure if you want the blogging power of Wordpress, but want to use Rapidweaver to make it look nicer? If this is the case, you would be using Rapidweaver as your main programme and use the Wordpress plug in from Yabdab to import your blog, or simply bypass wordpress altogether and use any of the other suggestions for blogging.
Foundation (and bootstrap based Foundry by @elixir) are incredibly powerful! If you have web design/development experience, they’re a great place to start. In my experience, I don’t have a dev background, it was easier for me to start with themes and experiment heavily before transitioning to Foundation/Foundry. I mostly use themes and customize the CSS around the edges. Most themes offer just about all of the options that you’d want to adjust, save for things like padding and margin around certain containers. I’ve been known to abuse(?) the theme dev’s vision by repurposing continaters using Joe Workman’s Houdini stack, which will let you put content anywhere.
TL;DR: start with themes/stacks if you don’t have a dev background. It’ll help the learning process and get you live faster.
There are two broad options with Rapidweaver themes.
Find a pre-built theme that looks how you want it. This could be a built-in theme but more likely a 3rd party purchase as these have more built-in options for customisation. It would also definitely be worth investing in Stacks 3 and a few carefully selected stacks to provide functionality you require. This is the easiest and quickest way and is great when you are looking to build a single site. The upside of this approach is that you see from the outset how it’s all going to look and the core design has been done by a professional developer. There are a number of great theme developers - find something you like and then search it in the forums to discover any pros and cons. Here’s a good place to look at themes (+ stacks and plug-ins) if you haven’t already: https://rapidweavercommunity.com/addons/themes
Buy one of the ‘blank’ themes e.g. Foundry from Elixir or Foundation from Joe Workman - there are others but these seem to have the most activity and are both excellent product sets. You can then design the site yourself using a stacks bundle that comes with it. The upside of this approach is that you can literally build the site how you want and tweak layouts in a way you can’t with a fixed theme. They are also a great purchase for those looking to build multiple sites, as the one theme will allow you to build in many different layouts and is therefore highly cost effective. The downsides are: a) it may be overkill for a single site; b) it will undoubtedly be more of a learning curve; c) will be more expensive for just one site.
I personally use Foundation these days and am very much looking forward to building some Foundry sites in the near future as I have long admired Adam’s work at Elixir. However, I have around 80 Rapidweaver client sites hosted so the blank theme approach is a no brainer. If I was just building a single site for myself I would probably buy a pre-built theme. Another reason Blank themes are better for client work is the clients have a habit of asking you to tweak something that can’t easily be tweaked in a prebuilt theme e.g. the look and feel of Navigation buttons, the logo position, or a built in border thickness!
Good luck with it all and the forum is a great place for help.
@Bazza the reason why i want to retain the use of wordpress is because it has a large readership audience. Apart from that, the functionality of wordpress really hinders my progress and more importantly, it costs a lot to maintain.
D
@manofdogz thank you again for your comprehensive guidance. I am more inclined to using a pre built theme alongside Stacks 3 for the reasons mentioned above. I am surprised by the large amounts of stacks on offer which allows the user to meet specific criteria - i can’t believe I never looked into this before!
@chet I agree with you 100% - i think using a theme will be the best approach for me to learn the basics. I will move onto specifc powerful tools such as Foundry once I have solidified my base.
These are quite a bit more than a blank theme. In fact, they should be referred to as frameworks, not just a theme.
They are both based on industry standard frameworks, and both come with a complete set of stacks. Some folks think it’s more expensive, but if you use the stacks that come with either of them, it can be cheaper.
A lot of people buy these frameworks and then purchase a bunch of other stacks, and that gets quite expensive and honestly will probably not be much better than using the stacks that come with the frameworks. In fact, in many cases, your page is going to load a lot of the frameworks JavaScript and CSS anyway, even if you use a non-framework stack that does the same thing. Now the learning curve is going to be a bit more, but you do get a lot more flexibility in the design.
As for non-framework themes, lots to choose from. Might want to check out something from @willwood’s stuff, all his offer demo versions so you can try before you buy.
Hi Dino, I’m interested to understand what you mean by ‘WordPress has a large readership audience.’ Can you elaborate?
Thanks
Rob
Doug is of absolutely right with this observation - by saying blank themes, don’t think they are somehow just an empty page upon which you can build your stacks - I phrased it like that for simplicity. The underlying power of these industry standard frameworks (foundation and bootstrap) is not to be underestimated and the value for money is exceptional. There are of course evangelists for both approaches but rest assured, both are good.
However for a one-off straightforward site the cost is normally higher than buying a single theme and a few required stacks. Probably the key here is ‘a few carefully selected stacks’ - there are sooooo many great stacks it is easy to splash the cash and get things that look great but have no function in your site! (I have so many). So if cost is an issue, think about what your site needs and then look carefully for what does the job.gungbeatle
I think we’re bit confused by what you mean by “map the website to Wordpress .com.
Wordpress .com is the turnkey fully hosted portion of Wordpress. Wordpress.org is the open source software that can be hosted by most hosting companies. Sounds little you’re hosting your domain and are asking if Wordpress .com can be used to host a RapidWeaver site?
If that’s one of your questions then (not sure why you want to) that’s a question more for Wordpress .com.
My understanding of them is the different plans they offer are more about Wordpress plugins and themes available, but I’m not sure, I’ve never hosted any site with them.
If you do decide to leave there hosting service, you would need to find out if you can, and how to transfer the domain. If I remember some of the plans they offer, your site runs as a subdomain.
You might want to post a URL to your current site, so folks here have a better idea of what you want to move.
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