This is probably a big ‘no’ but is there anyway to operate two versions of Rapidweaver on the same Mac, but with different sets of plugins and addons, etc?
I operate a number of sites, some of which have lots of addons, some have few, if any, but some sites seem to have issues that may be related to addons/plugins, and that may be affecting all sites made with RW.
My idea would be to have only the plugins for a particular project loaded or available to RW at one time. Then I could better assess what could be causing issues on one site, without having to strip RW of all its addons to test individually. Currently, troubleshooting across multiple projects is a nightmare, when each has a different set of addons and plugins.
Even having a single ‘clean’ install of RW to check things against would be helpful, like a ‘safe mode’ for the app.
Probably the simplest solution, and what I always recommend, is to stick with a minimum set of addons for each project. Uninstall the things that you aren’t using right now. Reinstall them only as they become needed. That will guarantee the smallest number of dependencies, updates, and compatibility issues.
If you launch he app with the shift key held down it will ask and you can temporarily disable various addons.
It might be more trouble than it’s worth, especially when you factor in system updates, plugin updates, and stack updates, etc. But you can set a custom location for your addons folder. You could keep an addons older next to each project and switch between them. Only installing the addons necessary for that project.
But be forewarned that when you come back to that project after a long absence you’ll likely be faced with many updates – or will have updated your system software or RapidWeaver itself. The challenge is that there is no stable ground. macOS keeps moving forward, so RapidWeaver does too, so Stacks does as well, etc. etc.
But keeping things simple and sticking to just a small number of addons for a given project is one way to at least minimize the amount of work you have to do in order to keep things updated and organized.
Sage advice. Yes, I will be having a major prune of RW’s addons before I start my next project. I work with a few legacy sites that are pretty addon-bloated, but I don’t have time to rebuild in one go, so they’er being pruned on an as-and-when basis.
I didn’t know about the shift-key trick: that will be most useful in helping me gauge which projects required what addons.