Stacks 3 -- Powerful, Fast, and with over 800 Stacks now available

Hi everyone!

After seeing everyone’s glowing reviews, went and bought the upgrade, but I’m running into a problem right off the bat. I’m using @joeworkman 's Mask stack for a pretty substantial portion of my homepage, but the stack is not showing up any longer when I preview the page. It will show fine in edit mode, everything still there (images, settings, etc.), just completely gone in preview.

I’m afraid to publish in case this goes to the Live site, but I’m hoping someone knows a quick fix I’m missing!

The rest of Stacks 3 looks amazing btw-- really great work!

Edit: Forgot to mention what I’ve tried/info about my setup:

Theme is Will’s A Blank Theme (v 5.0 from long ago- I think it’s 2.1 now. I’ve tried both)
Rapidweaver 6.3.2
Stacks 3.0.0 (I could have sworn I saw mention of 3.0.1 and 3.0.2 but this is what downloaded roughly 45 minutes ago from the yourhead site, and I see no “Update” in RW6 addons or stacks menus)

I’ve created a new project, tried all of the included themes, nothing seems to make the mask stack reappear in preview.

Thanks for the link to the video on Partials, Isaiah, I came here hoping to find more info than was available from the documentation page. Videos always help me get a handle on the overview, while solid, detailed documentation (thank you Will Woodgate for your always splendid job with this) help me with specifics.

It would be wonderful if developers could consolidate their manuals, documentation and videos on the same page as each product you are selling-or at least links. That way we don’t have to hunt around for the info.

since that involves one particular stack – i’d probably recommend contacting joe about it specifically.

@jody - That would be an interesting idea – a more mixed-media approach to documentation. I have to admit that sounds a bit outside my pay grade to be perfectly honest – :stuck_out_tongue:
but i’ll definitely consider the suggestion. thanks.

@isaiah I love the Custom Library Groups, and in general the organization of the stacks is way faster and overall improved, but there are a few things I either don’t understand or I find awkward (please forgive me if these have been explained elsewhere):

  1. First, regarding the post you were replying to, there doesn’t seem to be any way to “hide” stacks, but in the Library menu there is an option to “Show Hidden Stacks”? I don’t understand what that organizational function is supposed to do.

  1. Custom Stack Groups are easy to create and rename but they all appear exactly the same in the sidebar. The only way to know which group is which is to click each one and read the title at the top of the list of stacks within? It would be helpful to at least be able to add a custom icon instead of all just having a generic folder icon. Also, the ability to reorder the groups would be fantastic.

  2. Double clicking a tag in the Details of a stack creates a nifty grouping of all the other stacks with that tag in the Custom Library Groups pane. But, there doesn’t seem to be a way to add tags to existing stacks (except those you create yourself). Furthermore, there isn’t a way to name it or delete the Custom ‘Tag-Group’. And, it disappears whether you want it to or not when you restart RW. :confused:

  1. Show hidden stacks
    some stacks that developers have included for compatibility with existing documents can be hidden even though they are still active in the document – usually this is done when a newer and much better stack has replaced the older stack. this menu option gives you access to some of those older stacks. most users will probably never use it. But for the few that do need this one, it’s an important thing.

  2. Custom icons for library groups is a great idea. And you’re not at all the first to have it. It’s on my short list for future additions.

  3. Currently tags are part of the stack itself and set by the developer – this means that there is a built in sorting order to stacks and eliminates a lot of busy work for novice users – it’s a pretty important thing. I do get a lot of requests to add tags too. I think that may come sometime in the future – i do worry that it would add a bit of chaos – but perhaps a bit of chaos is balanced by the usefulness of the feature. I’ll add it to the list and do some prototyping and see where it leads.

Thanks for all the good suggestions, really appreciated,
Isaiah

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Excellent explanations, thank you.

I imagine you’ve probably already thought of this too, but regarding the tagging issue, perhaps there can be some distinction between user tags and developer tags? There sort of is a binary version of this already, with the ‘favorite’ tag that gets added by double-clicking a stack.

With 800+ stacks (and growing) any and all improvements in organization are certainly welcome! :smile:

whilst at it, Isaiah, please also consider (if possible) letting users re-arrange sidebar icons’s (groups) order :wink:
(example: let user move “whole library” or “partials” at the bottom)

thanks

Part of what I do is to structure and organize information from the target audience point of view. Developers are usually so far down the rabbit hole it’s hard for them to see it from the (frequently novice) user viewpoint. A good initial approach would be simply to combine whatever information you already have on the product page. For example the Partials vimeo - just add that to the Partials row where you have the oversize screenshot - make it a 3-column and add the video. Then develop a video for each of the new features and do the same. Add an area to link to the documentation page for Stacks 3, and you have everything organized (or linked) on one page. It’s often just a question of consolidating access to all the information in one spot convenient for the user.

@jody - “developer are so far down the rabbit hole”
Don’t I know it!!!

Fortunately for me, Christi does all of the writing, she is definitely not an engineer – but does have degrees, accreditation, and lots of experience writing and editing software manuals for many companies since the early 90s. She is, in a word, awesome. How lucky am I, right? :slight_smile:

Also… we keep the docs to very simple layouts as it makes them more accessible to those with special needs (screen-readers) and makes them more printable (i know, right? people still do that?). Stacks has been around since 2009 and YourHead has over 100K customers – a really mind boggling number of people are always super grateful when we think about accessibility.

And… probably goes without saying, but as a very small company (it’s just me and christi) the manual will get better as we have time more time to focus on it in the coming weeks.

But I think your ideas are good in principle. More media is better. We need to find a way to integrate it. Thanks again,
Isaiah

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is there a listing of the stacks included and what they do? i’m new and interested, I’m mainly looking for like a file upload stack, a pricing stack, and a Tab stack to be included…Thanks!

None of those stacks are included in the basic Stacks plugin, below are some images of the stacks that are included.

There are MANY developers out there. You can see some of them (not all developers are listed here) at the RapidWeaver Community Page.

For a file upload stack, Joe Workman makes a group of dispatch stacks that you can upload files with.

You can also get a list of stacks at StacksCentral for your other wanted stacks.

Thank you, they listed 800 so i thought it might be in something with that many…much thanks…

There are over 800 available to purchase, understand the confusion, but you will be amazed with what you can do with the Stacks plugin and the available stacks out there.

Hi!
Why after update themselves stacks version shows the old and the new version is shown only after restarting the program? Before such was not.

RW 7.4 and Stacks 3.5.3.

There was a problem that caused this bug since 3.5.1 (although somewhat intermittent) but it should be back to normal (version info in the library should show updated numbers again). We fixed this in an update that went out just yesterday in 3.5.5.

If you still experience the problem we’d like to hear as many details as you have from you. http://yourhead.com/support

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Thank you for reply!

You do know you are responding to a thread that is almost 2 years old right??

This person has just joined the forum and is trying to appear legit by commenting on old posts, then they’ll start spamming.

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… as here… ?

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