I have created, and have been adding to over the years, several websites using RW5, which is pre-stacks and doesn’t allow easy linking to social media (though I still love the results). Now thinking of upgrading my Mac operating system from 10.6.8 to whatever this 2011 machine will accept. I think that is High Sierra. This should allow me to upgrade Rapidweaver to RW7 or RW8. Anything I should watch out for? My biggest website has over 100 pages, each page being effectively an illustrated essay of 20 images and 10,000 words. I wouldn’t want to have to recreate it all again, especially at the risk of changing urls as many of those are now referred to in other people’s websites and in text books.
I know this is a bit of an overview question but any help much appreciated.
It may make sense to invest in a new iMac rather than what I’ve set out above. What do you reckon?
I would just keep RW5 for your old sites and build new sites in RW8. I have several old projects I maintain this way. Unless you want to re-do the old websites, there really isn’t any reason to upgrade them. You can have several versions of RW on one Mac.
That’s good to know that you can have different versions of RW on the one Mac. Thanks. I can’t help thinking that the home page of my sites could have more impact if I was using stacks (though presently I know very little about these!) and with easy ways of allowing readers to like/share on social media. Is it possible to basically keep a website that’s been designed by RW5 but have a homepage designed by RW8? Would I have to do a new homepage on RW8 and then drag all the old pages in the RW5 site into the new project set up on RW8? I suppose if I did that systematically I would retail the original urls
If you are wanting to upgrade parts of the site it would be best to just import the whole project into RW8. I think you can open the project file in 8 and it will perform the file upgrade. If that doesn’t work, you could download RW6 or RW7 and upgrade in series. There are many ways to do what you are wanting. It would be possible to create parts of the site in both RW 5 and RW8 but that isn’t the way i would do it. Just depends on how much work you want to put into changing the site.
If you look at the home page and one of the essays at random, does the format confirm your advice or suggest fine-tuning? I am so risk-averse with my computing. Yet whenever I do something new with it, things tend to work out. I probably need encouraging to get up to date!
I think the site looks fine as is. If you are wanting it to be more flashy and modern looking it will take some work to do so. Really just depends on what you want it to look like. i usually don’t upgrade sites but rather leave them as built. If a client wants a re-build I would do it in the current version of RW. Most software companies leave projects in the version originally built because many unforeseen problems arise when trying to upgrade.
I’ve now got a new Mac (2019 Mojave upgrading from 2011, 10.6.8) and RW8 (RW5 on old machine).
New Mac won’t open any files in RW5 so I reckon I have no choice but to migrate projects to RW8. These open with theme, webpages in place, but are blank in read and write mode. In other words, no text or images.
These pages are all very simple, just text and images. But there are a lot of them. 130 pages each with 10,000 words and 40 images, soo I don’t want to build them again from scratch, unless I have to.
Maybe if I was to install RW 6 or RW 7 on the new Mac that would do the trick? (As Parker has advised above.) In other words the pages would transfer to RW6 or 7 and then I’d migrate from 6 or 7 to RW8. Any more advice before I buy?