WebKarnage.Com

RAPIDWEAVER BETAS AND TESTS

We are fortunate enough to get the chance to try some great beta themes, plugins and other add ons for Realmac Software's great web authoring tool, RapidWeaver. From time to time, we even produce one or two ourselves!

Third party developers for RapidWeaver are more plentyful now than ever before, and the development of the Stacks plugin by Yourhead has inspired an astonishing amount of add ons for Stacks itself!

Go to our Stacks page to see our Stacks add ons and find out more about the testing that goes into them and other people's Stacks add ons too.

THEMES

Beta tests of themes are reasonably common, but tend not to last long, with most RapidWeaver Theme developers putting them out for a few days, and only when themes have unique and new technologies or options that a collective of testers can get through faster and from a wider range of angles. We all have our own favourite ways of weaving, and each will test themes or plugins differently.

PLUGINS

These are more rare, but last for longer as there is likely to be more unique code in a plugin when compared to other plugins than across a range of themes from the same developer. Plugin developers often ask for feedback regarding options/facilities too, with those new options then needing further tests. Plugin add-ons, particularly ones for Stacks are getting more commonplace.

UTILITIES

There have been a few stand out utilities when working with RapidWeaver (RWMultitool and ThemeMiner spring to mind), and there is an important one going through it's public beta right now by the name of Code Cutter.

RWMultitool 2

We were fortunate enough to get a chance to beta-test RWMultitool 2, a great support app for RapidWeaver, and it's new options were a big step forward. Not only can you still edit header images with ease, but now you can add text to those images with very little effort at all.

For those not wishing to be leaping from app to app when editing themes, this is a massive help and an efficient workflow.

Please see our page on Theme Editing Basics for a quick run through of the sorts of files this app can help you to edit, and how to get to them.

Code Cutter

There has been a long standing problem when users edit themes for their specific project, of what to do about theme updates. If you have re-named the theme, then you can go through the renaming process again, but all of your custom edits are wiped away. If the update includes important bug fixes, then it's not like you want to ignore it either.