RW 8 - a few things mising

Hi,

RW 8 is beautiful and is offering a bunch of fantastic new features. Thanks for that :slight_smile:

But I miss a couple of things:

  1. In the “pages” sidebar, it shows a common icon for all page-types. In RW 7 it was via an icon possible to see the actual type of page
  2. Some stacks are no longer available in RW8. Until now I have discovered that the JW Offsite stack is no longer present in RW 8 (there might be others turning up…)
  3. This one is a wish for future upgrades to RW. The features in RW are wonderful, but I miss one thing. A “real” HTML editor like for example SublimeText og Atom would be a fantastic additional tool to all the other very smart developer options and functions in RW. Would it be possible to integrate such an editor into RW so that when editing HTML directly in the various parts of RW one could benefit from the features of such an editor?
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That’s an option now in Preferences:
2018-08-19_05-03-22

JW Offsite copied over fine for me and seemed to work fine. Don’t know what else didn’t for you.

That would be a lot of work as an add-on for a product that is designed to “not require code.” Editors like Visual Studio Code, Atom and Brackets are open source and available for free. Editors like this have teams of developers working on them constantly. In my opinion, since most RW users don’t do a lot of HTML or CSS coding, those resources would be better spent improving RW in other ways.

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Thanks Doug,
I have now control over the first two issues :slight_smile: Thanks.

About the HTML editor, it might just be my opinion that RW would be a more complete developer tool when including a proper HTML editor. All the stacks out there can surely do most of the job, but as RW has the possibility to add code site-wise and page-wise I believe that editing HTML is not quite “out of scope” and that Realmac has recognized that :slight_smile:

One example is when you are individualizing an Ecwid store in RW. In Ecwid you can do a lot of styling and personalization, but when the need goes just a little beyond that, you need to add some HTML and/or CSS. This is fortunately possible in RW with the present tools, but my idea was just to make it a little more attractive for developers to make this personalizing and individualizing stuff :slight_smile:

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They do offer code complete in preferences, it’s not great, but I think for simple changes it works.
For more complicated pieces of code it’s best to just use one of the free open source options I listed above and copy and paste. Building a full featured editor within RapidWeaver would be a huge task.

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Thanks Doug,

I understand what you are saying. Just an idea :slight_smile:

I think no matter how much tries, Sublime/Atom/VSCode will always be much better editors – since it’s all they do. RW is a general purpose tool – so it’s editor will always be simpler.

Maybe a better way to phrase the feature request that might get more traction: try asking for the specific features you miss most. That way the Realmac guys can try to integrate the features that are most important first.

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I understand and agree with peterkroman wish. An example of an integration between a full package editor and a website builder is Pinegrow’s use of the editor Atom via a bi-directional plug-in.

Setting that side, can someone share with me if the files RW creates can be opened in an Editor in a non-destructive or complicated way (ie. with no auto-generated ‘IDs’ and ‘Classes’ with numerical names that are a challenge to ferret out)…or is there proprietary content exclusive to RW or any 3rd party elements purchased and used in an RW site that are a challenge to edit outside of RW??

This is a RW 8 pre-purchase question I can’t seem to find an answer too on the RW support page. TIA!

RW is a templating system. It combines the code of a theme with the content from a page, provided by a plug-in. While the system is intended to be used as-is – meaning never looking at the underlying code – most of the theme designers and plugin developers produce code that is “tinkering friendly”. And by that I mean that it’s not compressed into a mass of gibberish. There are some automatically generated names, but I think you’ll find that they’re few and many can be overridden with more friendly names.

The new RW themes, for example, are based on Bootstrap (a popular framework) and seem pretty easy to understand. I highly recommend grabbing the RapidWeaver demo download and exporting a few pages to see how the code looks.

There is no standard way of building a theme or page content, so probably best to check out the code before you commit to purchases. Some will definitely be more friendly to tinkering than others.

And lastly, I should mention, that all of these parts are API driven. There 3rd party theme developers and 3rd party plugin developers. If you see some part of the system where the code is not up to your standards – grab the API and build the code you want to see! :smiley:

That said, the system is “one way”. Meaning that changes you make to the code will not be re-incorporated back into the site the next time you hit publish. To make changes permanent you would likely have to build/modify your own theme.

Isaiah

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Isaiah –

Thanks a bundle! Your clarifying explanation is what i needed in order to understand what RW is – and excellent suggestion about downloading a trial, mocking something up, and exporting a file to see what gets generated!

And to clarify a bit more, while the new RW themes are built on Bootstrap 4, in general, RW is not solely a BS4 theme builder??

In other words if I were to layout a project in RW (using a standard theme or not and with or with out 3rd party elements), and then export the files, and open in an editor or Pinegrow in order to integrate some of my own HTML, CSS or JS code into the file, and then publish on my own via FTP, that would work (fingers crossed) just fine?

Appreciate your reply.

Just an FYI,
There are some framework themes like foundation out there as well as blank theme (both from joe Workman)

There are places to ad per-page code and CSS as well as site-wide

There is an html page type built in as well as markdown

Also when using the Stacks plug-in there are html stacks available

No, far from it. RapidWeaver is probably best described as a static site generator – but while most software in that category is usually for UNIX nerds, RW’s target audience is… well… pretty much everyone.

sure thing. that’s pretty much exactly my method of building my own site. RW doesn’t quite have the tools I want, so I build a site, export it, and use that as my starting place. I even insert a few handlebars template hooks into the various pages so that I can run some nice front-end dynamic JS.

that said, i’d highly recommend grabbing a built-in theme from the contents of the RW app, and modify it as much as possible there. if you can get a lot of your own code into the theme it gives you the ability to see your site closer to the finished product inside RW – like using the simulate windows to test your site on a bunch of devices all at once. then you can add the remaining JS dynamic bits in at the very end by hand or with a BASH script or something.

let me know how you get on with the project, i’d love to see more tech-minded folks join the community here!

isaiah

Most often I don’t use pre-designed themes in RW because I need to be able to follow a design document quite strictly. I use Foundation for RW as my favourite tool to achieve that.

It might be because of this combination that I feel a special need for a more fearured HTML editor inside RapidWeawer?

Venlig hilsen Peter

Thanks Isaiah!

To explain a bit further, I’m actually not a designer, but a soon to be Muse refugee, and after searching far and wide, I’m unable to find a no-coding site builder that can replicate my one-and-only current site, both in styling & widgets, including an in-site SqLight blog widget.

So, I’ve taken on the project of learning how to code myself, and while I’m still very much a beginner, I’ve learned enough to have this conversation, vet prospective software options, and know how to ask salient questions!

My personal site is rather simple, but it does have 2 tabs & 1 accordion widget, both of which I’ve taught myself how to make using some snippets found on the Web, and so I feel confident that I can ‘paste’ them it into the DOM with needed JS and attach a stylesheet. If RW export is clean enough, your method may turn out to be a good way to go!

…but for now the learning / searching journey continues…

Cheers!

oh, cool. i want that!

RW is a great place. You can do a whole lot in RW without coding. And when you hit the wall there are lots of ways to take the next step, whether it be a big step like building some pages by hand from scratch, a medium step like customizing a theme with your own CSS, or a tiny step like building a stack.

Best of all you can try most of this stuff out without spending any money. If it works, great! – then you can invest in the software. If it doesn’t, then the search continues. :slight_smile:

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Yeah, the blog widget is by QooQee for Muse, and all the styling is done directly in Muse, and postings are done via a ‘client’ portal in the browser. The version I have is also a CMS, you can check it out here: Muse Blog/CMS v.2

When I’m ready I will follow your suggestion and see if RW serves my purpose…thanks again!

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