Moving to www.weavers.space
For 10 years, I have been selling my products on my personal website, joeworkman.net. Over the past few years, I have felt the need to do two things: Redesign my website and move my products off my personal domain. So I thought that I would kill two birds with one stone. Starting today, you will find all my RapidWeaver add-ons have a new home at www.weavers.space.
The Making of…
The current version of joeworkman.net was designed in 2011, with the help of my good friend KaL Micheal. At the time, it was a killer website. But the site has felt old for years. This year, Google started docking a website’s ranking if it did not have a mobile version. This pushed my hand even harder to get a new redesign out the door.
In November 2017, I recruited my friend Jon Hawkins to help with the new site design. We brainstormed and came up with a few requirements for the site, outside of it looking world class.
- It must be made with RapidWeaver.
- It must be manageable outside of RapidWeaver.
I wanted to build a site that would push the boundaries of what people thought was possible with RapidWeaver. I am 100% confident that we did that!
You might think that it’s obvious that I build my website with RapidWeaver. Yet, not every developer does. In my opinion, if I am going make a living off a platform, I need to make sure that I use it. As the old saying goes, I eat what I sow. Also, I enjoy using RapidWeaver. And it wouldn’t be me if I didn’t try to push the limits.
The project file for joeworkman.net was big. I had 150 products and every single one had its own page. When you added in all the supporting pages, it was north of 200 pages. If I wanted to change the layouts of all my product pages, it was not an easy task. The crazy thing is that I know of users that have sites twice that size! I knew that I could do better.
To the average visitor, the new site looks like it has hundreds of pages. Every product, news article, and design has its own unique URL. Now to build this in RapidWeaver, you would think that I would have another gigantic project file, but no. The public side of the website is only 14 pages inside of the project file. And that include the boring pages like privacy policy and terms. The admin portal adds another 11 pages. That brings the grand total for this entire project to 25 pages. Insert mind explosion gif here…
This is possible because I use Total CMS in the background to manage all the content. I then use RapidWeaver to design how that content is going to look. Essentially, I am using RapidWeaver to build webpage templates. Total CMS then takes those templates and applies the content to them. So even though I have over 100 products. I only need to build one product page. When you visit the page for a particular product, Total CMS will take all the data for that product (images, text, colors, etc) and apply it to the template.
Now to make this dream a reality, I have been working on Total CMS 2. It started over from ground zero and have created a stunning product. It’s in private beta right now. I cannot wait to get it into your hands in 2019.
There are a ton of great new products used to make the new Weaver’s Space site. Wallpaper has made its debut with the launch of the new site. I plan on doing its own official announcement soon. But go check it out. It’s a stunning stack that is the most used stack throughout the website.
We used many unreleased stacks to make this site: Horizon, Image Pro, Divide, Layers, Drift, Icon Pro, Video Pro, MovingBox 3, Sweet Button 3, Portal, SEO Helper 2, and Page Speed. And those are only the ones that I can think of, off the top of my head. In all, I have over 15 new stacks in develop and I cannot wait to start getting those into your hands.
As a fun exercise, see if you can find where all these new stacks are being used. Post your findings and thoughts on the Weaver’s Space Community I cannot wait to hear them.
Changing Domains
I have had a lot of questions about my move off my personal domain. In a nutshell, I felt as if it was holding me and the entire community back. The Weaver’s Space brand is bigger than me. The Weaver’s Space community deserves to grow.
When I would talk to people about my software and the amazing community behind it, they showed interest. But the moment that I gave them the URL (joeworkman.net), you could immediately tell that they no longer took it seriously. It went from being great software and community to make websites, to a rinky-dink operation ran by some guy named Joe Workman.
For a while, that offended me. But, their outsider perception was not wrong. My name was holding back the community from growing. So a couple of years ago I started Weaver’s Space as a forum for my products. It’s flourished over that time into an amazing place to learn, help each other and have some fun. But there was something else that it did. The new community site helped associate this new brand with Joe Workman (devious, I know.) 
The Weaver’s Space community has grown so much more than Joe Workman. Users log in and help each other out all day every day, whether I am there or not. The Friday hangouts happen like clockwork. Whether I am there or not (or if I fall asleep during them, like yesterday.) The thought of the community not growing because of a perception tied to a single person’s name is not fair. With a larger community, we will have more people to learn from and help. We can also have more events, which are fun.
Get Involved in the Fun
So the final transition is here. Moving all my products over to the Weaver’s Space brand feels natural now. I will be working on getting everyone involved in all aspects of the community.
The new Designs section is a great way to show off the amazing designs that other member have built with RapidWeaver and Stacks. We will be accepting new submissions soon. So keep an eye out for the announcement and get ready to submit some of your latest creations.
The News section is already full of some very interesting articles that I have found around the web. If you find an interesting article on the web, make sure to post it on the community. I will keep an eye out for post-worthy links. I also plan on getting members involved in writing articles and tutorials. If you want to publish articles on the Weaver’s Space News, please contact me.
Anyway, I hope that you enjoyed my ramblings here. Please let me know what you think of the new site. It does push the limits of RapidWeaver. And the best part is that I am not keeping it to myself. You will be able to make a site like Weaver’s Space soon. If you are not a member of the community yet, go sign up. It’s a great place to hang out. I can’t wait to interact with you there!
P.S. Don’t forget to check out Wallpaper too. It’s pretty cool.