[Macworld]

Post your comments for RapidWeaver 5.1 here

[Peteryur]

Rapidweaver is not a successor of iWeb. It is an alternative to it. Since the two technologies are totally different, Rapidweaver cannot import any site created by iWeb. To switch from iWeb, you have to start the design process from scratch.

[ColinLai]

The writer forgot to mention the vast collection of plug-ins for RapidWeaver that adds various powerful features to it. I myself use Rapidblog and it's a must-have if you use RapidWeaver for writing blogs. The availability of its plug-ins makes RapidWeaver stands out from other similar products.

[probert]

As ColinLai stated there is huge third party support for this app. In fact it really is a starter kit for plug ins like stacks and blocks etc.. It also has great forum and tutorial support.

I use it along with css edit, firebug (firefox plugin, and thememiner to modify theme code to create custom themes.

It operates on the border between template software and wysiwyg coders. If you have no interest in code you can just use it to make a nice site - if you are interested in code it's a great place to start playing around while completing a useable site.

It is very much more sophisticated and flexible than iWeb.

Overall an excellent program with a small learning curve.

[DKotaev]

I use this, and I must say it's an awesome app, extendable with many plugins. If there was one thing that would be wrong with it, it's that you can't edit the HTML, CSS, and Java inside RapidWeaver; therefore a combination of Coda and RapidWeaver would be ideal.

[Biallystock]

ColinLai, on 03 May 2011 - 07:50 AM, said:

The writer forgot to mention the vast collection of plug-ins for RapidWeaver that adds various powerful features to it. I myself use Rapidblog and it's a must-have if you use RapidWeaver for writing blogs. The availability of its plug-ins makes RapidWeaver stands out from other similar products.

The collection of plug-ins rapidly increases the price of RapidWeaver.

Plus RapidWeaver charges fairly hefty upgrades for relatively minor improvements or just bug fixes which add even more bugs.

[neploleppard]

There definitely is no comparison between iWeb and Rapidweaver. RW is a powerful web design application with a lot of versatility. If one had the budget to install everything available for RW (addons, themes, etc.), it would be be a force and a half to mess with.

iWeb is nothing more than a web version of an iWork app. The Info panel is exactly the same template. iWeb designs very simply, slow running websites. It's not just dying out... it's nearly dead. Apple released iLife '11 this year with no changes whatsoever to iWeb. The software was included entirely as the previous version. Essentially, it was ignored entirely, yet (oddly) included in the package.

I can't imagine Apple doing anything more with iWeb, it's so far behind now it needs to be either recreated from scratch or gutted thoroughly. RW is in version 5 and flourishing. Granted, the guys at RM that designed RW seem to have a bit of an ego issue, and wouldn't know customer service it if bit them on the ass. Nevertheless, their product is far better for professional quality web design.

[spinoza2]

"iWeb is nothing more than a web version of an iWork app. The Info panel is exactly the same template. iWeb designs very simply, slow running websites."

This is about as untrue as it gets, and betrays someone who has zero experience with iWeb. As others here have pointed out, iWeb takes a radically different design philosophy than standard HTML editors like Rapidweaver. An experienced iWeb designer can prototype and build a professional Website in a fraction of the time that a Rapidweaver user can.

Apple hasn't updated iWeb in so long because there's little need to update, it already embodies the design principles it wishes to pursue. The full iWeb/MobileMe ecosystem presents a developer with a powerful Web-development environment.

One last note--Rapidweaver possess little support for HTML5.

[2stepbay]

RapidWeaver Classroom is an excellent source for learning to use RW as well as working with advanced features such as CSS. Highly recommend.

[realphotographer]

Biallystock, on 03 May 2011 - 06:45 PM, said:

ColinLai, on 03 May 2011 - 07:50 AM, said:

The writer forgot to mention the vast collection of plug-ins for RapidWeaver that adds various powerful features to it. I myself use Rapidblog and it's a must-have if you use RapidWeaver for writing blogs. The availability of its plug-ins makes RapidWeaver stands out from other similar products.

The collection of plug-ins rapidly increases the price of RapidWeaver.

Plus RapidWeaver charges fairly hefty upgrades for relatively minor improvements or just bug fixes which add even more bugs.

I have never had to pay for an upgrade to Rapid Weaver and have gotten very good customer and tech support from them, albeit via email only

[rlav]

Sandvox 2 has just been released. I hope Macworld carries a review of that program, too, hopefully with some reasonably systematic comparison with RapidWeaver and iWeb.

[EdwardJanne]

I thought RapidWeaver is good, if a little too much like iWeb for my tastes ... in other words, a little unintuitive. I didn't play with it a lot because I couldn't get it to publish to my server via sftp so it was kind of pointless for me to explore it any further. Sandvox connected without issue, and seems to be more intuitive, but it has other problems ... it seemed to upload things to the wrong place and it crashed several times. If these and iWeb are the best there are, then I guess I'll have to go back to hand coded html and good-ole drag-n-drop site management.

[danodell]

Forget iWeb. I was a lover but - not now. It ate one of my sites. I built one at home, one at work, and you can only access them via the computer the iWeb domain file is on. So copied the domain file and brought it to work and visa versa. Import one to the other and open it up and it only saves the one. The other site is still up, but - when I went to open an old domain file for the other site - nothing. I think I would have had to trash anything else for it to work, then take it off and untrash the other site. Pain. Grief. Downloading and recreating or reloading onto iWeb is beyond me - and now I;m afraid I'll lose the one site I can update. So, I'm lookng at WP - ugh. And now RW... Sigh - nothing is drag and drop.

[sharte]

As a web designer, I used Dreamweaver up until my recent change to Rapidweaver. I like RW quite a bit but it is far from perfect, though much easier to learn than DW.

RW shines with (YourHead) Stacks 2 (a must addition). With Stacks you can easily extend RW to do most anything: CMS, jQuery slideshows, animation... pretty much all the bells and whistles you can think of.

Though RW is a theme based site creator, a common mistake is to think one can't easily implement their own design. Themes like Blueball's FreeStack, essentially a blank theme, allows one to easily create their own theme with any look they like.

The main downside I see with RW is reliability. With so many 3rd party extension developers, extensions/addons can very often conflict and not work well together. Even Stacks 2, in it's earlier versions, had images mysteriously disappear just by bringing a site back up in RW. Recently, there was a panic as Stacks 2 and various jQuery based extensions could not work with Google's recent jQuery 1.9 update.

Until RW becomes more reliable, web developers will need to think hard if this is the way to go. For hobbyists, who are only handling a few sites, RW is a no-brainer (SandVox a close 2nd). Lot's of possibilities, inexpensive, easy-to-learn and not a huge deal when things conflict and need troubleshooting.

My hope is that RW and Stacks (YourHead) come together to make some fool-proof standards for Stack devs to lessen the troubleshooting end of maintaining a site. Until then I will be using Wordpress for my bigger corporate sites.