What-would-you-like-to-see-in-rapidweaver-7

Continuing the discussion from What would you like to see in RapidWeaver 7?:

considering that I have only been using rapid weaver for about 3 days and didn’t know how it works until some one told me. Not doing bad actually. However I still think you should be able to chose a wider variety of fonts compared to what I can do now. I find it boring actually that we are limited to size and fonts. I have to say that is where sandvox excels where rapid weaver fails at. However that being said, I like how rapid weaver has so much more you can do that is why I switched.

Hi Garyp

Welcome to Rapidweaver!

There is next to nothing you cannot do in Rapidweaver and Stacks. Well okay… there are some things you cannot do but fonts and styling options are pretty much unlimited.

Have you discovered Stacks 3 yet?

The thing with fonts is that there is no point RapidWeaver allowing you to use a font unless it is available to those who are going to view your site. It either has to be a standard font which should be on anyone’s computer or it has to be provided, either by a service such as Google Fonts or by being hosted on your site. There is support for all these in RW, depending on what themes and stacks you are using. For instance, Foundation has built-in support for Google Fonts. You can add fonts to any theme if you know a very small amount of CSS. For instance, there are a many excellent free fonts on http://www.fontsquirrel.com which can be downloaded as webfonts. There are stacks which will help you to integrate Google fonts or downloaded fonts into your RW sites.

PD’s advice is spot on - you can’t simply use fonts that exist on your mac / PC and expect them to work on the web. If you don’t want to use a little CSS there are font stacks out there. You could use the excellent Calligrapher stack from Doobox. 50 odd fonts built in + 600+ google fonts and with a bit of work add custom fonts also. Other stacks I don’t know so well but are bound to be good include Letterpress from joe Workman, Fontstacks from Stacks4Stacks and CustomFont Stack from Instacks.

There are a few good Google fonts but they’re mostly rubbish, so if you want a good selection of fonts, I’d look at http://www.fontsquirrel.com who give you most of the css if you download their webfonts. For those using Foundation, Big White Duck produce a Font Styles stack which simplifies the use of self-hosted fonts such as these.

If you want to see the full range of stack options available to you, select the Fonts category on StackCentral and you’ll find plenty of excellent solutions.

Marten

With http://instacks.com/customfontstack/ you are able to integrate all kid of web fonts, either file based like from fontsquirrel, or cloud based from fonts.com, typography.com, or google fonts.

Apologies if this has already been requested, but please, please, please disable auto-correct in the Header area. Incredibly frustrating, for example, to type in “COM” and within a second watch Rapidweaver change that to “COMMENT”

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I second that, @dave. I’ve had the same problem with the site-wide code. I don’t think we should need to wait for RW7 for that, though.

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I would love to have a dedicated images folder for each site that can be defined in the preferences. This way you can save all your images in one location and use them in the site. If you decide to swap out an images in that folder, you just have to upload the new image to the server, no need to make changes on any pages or code. this is a pretty standard practice (especially if you are a DW user).

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@thebugnut – there are already some gallery stacks which work this way. I’m not sure there’s any need for it to be built into RW.

I am not talking about image galleries, I am talking about images that are used within the design and dedicated images on pages throughout the site. This is still by far my #1 built in feature request.

Oh, well, I don’t really see the problem then. I do that with every project, uploading the images to an image folder by FTP. I don’t think there’s any advantage having RW do it for you.

@peterdanckwerts I don’t think you understand what I am trying to say. Let me come back to this once I can explain in better.

Oh, yes, please doo!

You can already use the resources feature for this - just click on the “Relink” option for the existing image.

—Nik

Will see what we can do.

I should not have to “Relink” anything if the site used a default images folder. No code would change on the site, just the image would be different.

When working on a new design, it is common for me to sometimes go through several versions of the same image until I get it just right. I edit my work in in Photoshop and overwrite the existing image, go back to my Web Design software and check how it looks. Since no code has changed on the site, the Web Design software just updates the image automatically. When working on a small site, it’s not that big a deal. Once your image assets start to really build up on larger projects, it helps to have a certain amount of automation and a streamlined workflow.

Thanks for clarifying. I’ll double-check what our behaviour here is. In theory, if a resource is exported to the same location & name, its changed variant should appear in RW.

We’ll probably need to check if the files have changed (so that they’re marked as “Changed” in RW)…

—N