This alone (which I know from the slack group was a ton of work) is worth the price of admission!!!
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It might be useful if your detailed out your preview workflow. There are a lot of ways to preview nowadays
this is an intentional change to improve performance while editing partials ā one of our top goals for Stacks 4.
when the simulate window first appeared we did the naive thing: we just rendered everything like normal ā but all the time.
that works great until a partial gets large ā or is used in a lot of places. in those cases every tiny change causes a huge re-render. which ā¦ is ā¦ slowā¦ 
ā¦ and ā¦ annoying. 
In Stacks 4 the problem only gets worse with partials. A tiny change can cause multiple projects to re-render. Yuck.
So in Stacks 4 we keep things strictly modalā¦ the partial/external/template doesnāt render its changes until youāre done editing it. This keeps the editing performant.
I think thereās room to have this be decision be a user-option ā or perhaps a āsaveā button that forces things to render. I think so long as users know what theyāre signing up for. Iāll add a feature request to our list to give this a try. No promises, but it seems like itās probably doable.
This definitely shouldnāt be the case. But itās difficult to investigate without more specific info. It would be great if you could share a project file that makes this easy and obvious to see. Then weāll be able to open that project and blammo the bug will be right in front of me. When a bug is obvious, then I can always fix it.
Also: And I know this is a huge request ā but itās so important you canāt believe ā the simplest example is best ā if the example has stuff like a framework or 40 3rd party stacks ā then itās going to be very very very difficult for me to exactly recreate those circumstances. If you can get Stacks to misbehave with simple built-in stacks thatās always best ā if you must use a 3rd party stack to demonstrate a bug please please please stay away form frameworks and keep it to one or two 3rd party stacks. Any more than that and reproducing the bug becomes just about impossible. :-/
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Great update - makes RW with stacks even more intuitive and reduces workload. Very well explained in the videos which are just what you need to get going and nothing you donāt - a rarity these days! Well done Isaiah, I couldnāt do my websites without you (and Joe Workman)!! Oh, and also easy update through RW8 which simply tells you an upgrade has been releasedā¦
Hi @isaiah. Thanks for letting me know. It would be great to have the preview render of partials an option as, at least for me, itās really important to see how tiny changes affect the overall layout/design of things like menus that are usually used as partials. At the moment Iām working around it by unpacking and editing, then packing and replacing the partial. Not ideal but easier than; ādo a change-go back to preview-do another changeā etc. I never noticed a speed issue, but then Iām using UIKit, which is blazing fast anyhow.
Good to know itās not the UIKit framework thatās doing it @Lucas !
As for the other issue of the preview not looking correct even outside partials, that was me. I tracked it down to having pasted in some stacks from another site that had another ācustomiserā in them, so it was conflicting. The simulator seems to be working fine now.
Cheers
Hi Stuart,
Iām loving Srcerer and I think it will become my image stack of choice, particularly due to large range of built-in styling options plus the ability to warehouse images.
Do you have a gallery stack along similar lines? I canāt see one on your website and would like a simple gallery stack with options like Srcererā¦hope you have something in the oven along those lines.
I see youāre from Glasgowā¦me tooā¦well actually from Australia but living here now.
Cheers Scott
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Hi @scottjf. Yes - from Glasgow. Think there are a few Weavers in this neck of the woods! Good to meet another 
Glad to hear you like Srcerer. I think itās a great stack - though I think most people just use it as a regular image stack (to make use of the effects etc) instead of exploiting all the responsive options. Whatever works for people though is fine by me.
As for using it in a gallery type set up. I did start work in that very thing but never saw it through. Iāll definitely look at it again when I get a chance. Or Iāll see if there is scope for it to be made compatible with some existing gallery solutions.
Getting back to the subject of the post stacks 4.
I think a āsaveā or ārefreshā button would be great(a keyboard shortcut for would be even better). Iāve noticed the issue on more than partials. I wouldnāt want to slow down edit mode with every keystroke by making it a preference.
Thanks Stuart,
Maybe we should have a āScottish Weaversā get together at some stageā¦over a bevy or two?
Let me know if and when you do anything with a gallery.
Cheers Scott
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i want to be very clear here: partials/externals/templates being modal isnāt an āissueā. i tried a bunch of other stuff ā it was either confusing or just too slow ā and decided being modal and rendering when the external is saved to disk ā that seemed the clearest and fastest.
i can see that the old immediate behavior might be nice in some cases.
or, as you say, a save button to save things to disk and force the render would be great too.
BUTā¦
if there are times when preview isnāt displaying exactly the right thing, then that doesnāt sound like something that can be overridden ā that just sounds like a bug. and no matter how many times you click a save button, itās not going to fix a bug. LOL 
if you see times when stacks isnāt displaying exactly what it should, then please please just submit a bug. if you can give me a relatively simple way of reproducing that bug, i can probably fix it pretty quickly.
then i can save you having to click a redundant button. 
Update: bug reports can be submitted to our support link, of course, but even better is our bug list. all you have to do is click here and give me the details/projects/stacks/whatever to help in describing the bug. this link is like a super-power, it totally bypasses all support queues and just dumps it right into my to-do list.
I canāt find my promo code 
I just upgraded to the most recent version of Stacks 4 (didnāt take note of full version #, silly me) and I am using RW 8.1.7. I can no longer publish any of my pages. The minute I try to publish RW crashes. Is there a way I can go back to your previous version or do I have to upgrade to RW 8.4 (which I havenāt done thinking I should wait until all bugs are out). I was confident in your abilities to have very clean code, so I went ahead and upgraded. I have not had any issues with Stacks 4 until this latest version. Thanks.
Iād try the latest, non-beta version of RapidWeaver. Thatās currently 8.2.1. You can download it from here:
You should be able to publish fine with 8.1.7. You can tell the stacks version number in the add-ons manager.
I went back and uploaded 4.0.1 being told it was an older version, but I played through ( 
) and now I can publish again. Thanks for getting back so quickly. Still no idea why the newer version keeps crashing.
4.0.1 is the current production version of stacks. Anything ānewerā is a beta version and will more than likely have bugs.
Thank you. As noted, I usually wait.
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