Now that Softpress Freeway is no longer around, I am considering Rapidweaver. I’m curious what else will I need to build a site similar to my Freeway site? www.yosemitecollection.com. What extras will I also need to purchase? Will I need to buy a theme and stacks? What about foundations? Any help would be appreciated.
That’s pretty tuff to answer, I would suggest you have a look at some themes here to start with you may find something that suits you.
You can’t go wrong with stacks, it opens up a whole new level of design possibilities in RW.
Foundation is one of the available “free style” themes that allow you almost total control, but it ads a level of learning curve to the equation.
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@joeworkman did a series of google hangouts to help freeway users understand and move to Rapidweaver/Stacks/Foundation.
There are a few ex-freeway users now using the combination and with luck one or two of them will chime in here with some answers for you.
Have a look at foundry as well: http://foundry.elixirgraphics.com
You have quite a freedom to create pages to your liking, but the learning curve is not steep. You need to buy Stacks to use it.
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Thank you for the replies. Yes, Freeway was enough of a learning curve for me. I’ll take the quicker way and focus on my content.
I moved to RapidWeaver from Freeway just after Softpress shut down. I downloaded RW and stacks as a preview for about 3 weeks before I decided to make the investment. It was pretty clear that I needed stacks to do a lot of what I was used to with Freeway. I have also invested in a few add-ons to duplicate features that were in Freeway. In general I am very happy with what RW does. Developing in RW with stacks is very clean and quick. I spent a lot of time finding the right theme as a foundation for my site. The great thing is with stacks you can find a add-on to do what you need if you don’t want to spend the time coding it yourself or for simple things I have just used jQuery and done my own coding.
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Hugh,
Having looked at your site, you should be able create something similar using RW along with the Stacks plugin, and a image gallery stack such as Photos by Nick Cates, Gallery 3 by InStacks, or ProGallery by Will Woodgate.
You don’t need to invest in a framework such as Foundation or Foundry, unless that appeals to you. You may be better off investing in a CMS (e.g., Pulse CMS) to store your images but even that wouldn’t be necessary.
As for themes, just start with what is included with RW. If you not happy with those, some developers provide demo’s themes that you can experiment with before purchasing (e.g., Themeflood, Henk Vrieselaar).
Good Luck