Isaiah Carew of YourHead today announced the official 1.0 release of Stacks. Stacks is an amazing RapidWeaver plug-in that allows simple drag-and-drop web page creation.

“We're very proud to announce that we've completed our beta testing and we've released Stacks 1.0. Over the past two months we've had help from thousands of beta testers and have fixed more bugs than we care to admit. The result of all that hard work by the dedicated testers is the most powerful tool for RapidWeaver layout ever.”

Stacks come with a number of ready made Stacks objects: Text, Columns, Image, Left Float Image (text wraps around the image), Right Float Image (text wraps around image), HTML and Stack (think rows). Third party developers are also building Stacks Objects to add even more functionality. Theme design outfit Elixir Graphics has released a free Twitter stack that imports a Twitter feed into your web page.

The best thing about Stacks is that you can “nest” objects within other objects. For example, lets say you want a two column layout on the top of your page and in the right hand column you want to easily place a Twitter feed:



Check out the Stacks page over at YourHead for more info. Isaiah has created some excellent screen casts showing how to use Stacks and highlighting its feature set. You can also download the demo before you buy.

Stacks is $19.95 and requires Leopard 10.5, RapidWeaver 4.2.1 or later and will work on both Intel and PowerPC Macintosh computers.

Tags:plug-ins, new, announcement

Yesterday RapidWeaver Plugs, makers of the wonderful Styled Text+ plug-in for RapidWeaver, released a new, incredibly useful plug-in: Partitions. Partitions allows RapidWeaver’s to slice and dice a page into sections making organizing content a breeze. The real power with Partitions comes when using it on a project with Loghound’s amazing PlusKit plug-in. With Pluskit in the project, you can import any other page style into a partition.

Each partition can be styled separately from the others and there are also alignment controls, border, margin and back ground color settings. See the page inspector images below:




Partition sells for $16.00 USD which is an amazing price for an amazing plug-in. Read more about Partitions here in the Partitions announcement thread at the RapidWeaver support forums. You can also get more information and download a demo at RapidWeaver Plugs.

Tags:plug-ins, new

YourHead Software yesterday treated RapidWeaver’s to a sneak peak of the as yet unreleased Stacks plug-in. Stacks looks to be a “must have” RapidWeaver plug-in and will no doubt be a big hit among novice and advanced weaver’s alike. With Stacks, users get Blocks like drag and drop functionality. Stacks goes further, however, and adds dynamic text fluidity to webpage layout. Stacks coolest feature, in our opinion, is nest-able objects. According to YourHead’s Stacks page:

“Build columns within columns within rows within columns. Or group a stack of objects inside a box. Almost anything is possible with Stacks.”

We were lucky enough to get in on beta testing and can safely say that Stacks floored us. It might be going a bit too far to say that Stacks brings revolutionary new features and ease of use to building websites with RapidWeaver, but from our early testing we aren’t too far of the mark. Stacks truly is a very special plug-in. Here are the types of stacks available:

• Text
• Images
• HTML
• Columns
• Left Floating Image
• Right Floating Image
• YouTube
• Stack (gives you another area to drop all of the above)

Each stack is also customizable. You can change the color of the stack background, for example, or rotate, scale and blur images via pop-up HUD’s. Oh and did we mention that @import and Loghound’s awesome Plus-Kit plug-in works just fine with Stacks? Well, it does at least in our testing. If you’re curious to see what you can do with Stacks check out our Stacks Demo page. For even more Stacks info watch the screen cast included on the Stacks page. Isaiah Carew of YourHead runs through many of Stacks features and gives a better idea of what it will bring to the RapidWeaver table. Then check out SupportCasts Stacks screen cast for another great video on Stacks,

We’re very excited here at AYAAW and can’t wait for the official release of Stacks next year. Isaiah, here’s our wallet, take what need.

Tags:plug-ins, yourhead

yabdab Software, makers of the PayLoom and GoogaLoom plug-ins for RapidWeaver, announced today the immediate availability of FormLoom. FormLoom is a plug-in designed to create forms that go beyond what the Contact page included with RapidWeaver can do. FormLoom offers the following features:

• AJAX Powered (never leave the page submission).
• Include CC and BCC addresses.
• Limit which files can be attached based on file extension.
• Filter input for possible spam injections.
• Includes reCaptcha security questions.
• Send Receipt email to sender.
• Custom Success message to sender.
• Customize look with CSS
• Automated MySQL Entry (coming in final release)

Requirements for building and serving up FormLoom pages are:

RapidWeaver 4
Server running PHP 5 or better.
Server running MySQL 5 or better (optional).

We here at AYAAW are very excited about this new plug-in and we've even thrown together a Contact Us page using it. Unfortunately there are a few kinks to work out yet so don't bother trying to send us anything through the page. We won't get it. Don't worry, as soon as its functional we'll let you know.

Tags:plug-ins

Gary Byrd of RapidWeaver Themes and Mudbug Software (maker of Webify), and Ollie Levy have teamed up as RapidWeaver Plugs and have released a killer RapidWeaver plug-in as their inaugural offering: Styled Text +. Styled Text + is a new page type that builds on the Styled Text page included with RapidWeaver by adding a dedicated header and footer area on each page. The header and footer are set up as mini Styled Text pages within the page so you have all the regular Styled Text page tools at your disposal. This is a truly sweet plug-in and RapidWeaver Plugs is selling it for the absurdly low price of $5. If you use RapidWeaver for building sites and use the Styled Text page Styled Text + will quickly pay for itself in time saved not having to fiddle with snippets or trying to decipher all the code you have pasted into your Styled Text pages. We love it here at AYAAW and are already using it on our site.

Download the demo and try it out before you buy.

Tags:plug-ins

Recently, AYAAW noted that third party RapidWeaver developers were starting to integrate the Sparkle updating system into thier plug-ins. One of the top plug-n developers, Loghound, has finished upgrading all his plug-ins with Sparkle. If you use RapidWeaver with any plug-ins installed you know how huge this is. In the not too distant future the first step in troubleshooting RW, "check to see if all your plug-ins are up-to-date" will be a distant, bad memory.

We here at AYAAW use a lot of plug-ins, probably more than your average RapidWeaver user. 16 to be exact, 5 of which are made by Loghound. Add those to the 2 YourHead has Sparklefied and that's the majority of the plug-ins we use on a daily basis. Sweet!

So, AYAAW sends out a big thanks to Loghound for all his hard work. He's top-dog in our book!

Tags:plug-ins

Something great is happening in and around the RapidWeaver community: plug-ins are getting updated with Sparkle auto-update functionality. If you use RapidWeaver, which we do everyday for this and other sites, and have bought plug-ins to add features to it, you'll appreciate this. The process of keeping your plug-ins up to date is and arduous one and is generally the first step you take in troubleshooting RapidWeaver ungoodliness (hey if Steve can make up words, so can I). We have 15 plug-ins installed here at AYAAW. That's 15 different change logs we have to check every time RapidWeaver gets updated or when RW starts acting up (ungoodliness). The good news is that RW's awesome third party developers are always improving their plug-ins. That bad news is that its a royal pain in the keister to have to individually check each plug-in to see if its up to date. Anywho, the premier third party developers are now integrating Sparkle auto updating into their plug-ins so hopefully this will be a distant bad memory in the not so distant future.

So far, these are the plug-ins that we know include Sparkle auto-updating:

Yourhead's Collage, Carousel and Blocks
Loghound's PlusKit

If you know of more let us know. In the meantime for help keeping your plug-ins up to date and for other general RapidWeaver goodness, check out Ed Brenner's myRapidWeaver site.

Tags:plug-ins, update