Not seen a post on here about it for months, sorry if there was one and I missed it!
Did anything ever come of it? I vaguely recall it getting some mentions perhaps as long ago as the start of last year… was a beta released? Then nothing.
I see that Joe is still releasing stuff, and taking over other devs stacks, so I’d assume something is happening.
I know Yourhead has their own news channel, but I can’t recall what it is, only that when I did try to use it to get some info, it was just a mass of people arguing about something or other, with no actual news.
From the outside, it appears “Stacks App” has remained in developer beta for the past few years and hasn’t yet reached a point where it’s ready for day-to-day use. There also hasn’t been much in the way of clear public update for some time.
We do keep an eye on the Stacks blog, but there haven’t been any updates there either and it now appears to be offline…
If people here are exploring different workflows or tools in parallel, we’re always happy to answer general questions about how others are approaching modern RapidWeaver projects today.
Hope that helps, and wishing everyone a good start to 2026
I dont think it is dead - Joe seems pretty confident about it. I do agree that it is annoying that we cant have regular progress updates. We get more life updates from Isaiah than we do Stacks updates.
If you are referring to the Stacks.app Public beta 48 build (6277) that’s now over six months old without an update. We the public beta users have received little news and as you mentioned many of us are trying to read in-between the lines of the developers comments on the various sites & channels.
Please note that Stacks.app developer beta is getting regular updates, which a few developers take turns saying how great it is, each time this question is asked.
It’s been since late November for the latest developer build. I was hoping that we would get a public beta before the New Year. Isaiah is putting a lot of effort into the image engine at the moment. I am pretty sure that once that is done, we will see a new public version.
I started doing some 1-on-1 training a few months ago. I have 2 customers that wanted to use Stacks 6 exclusively. While there are a few minor roadbumps, it’s going pretty smoothly with 2 projects using Stacks 6, Foundation 6 and Total CMS 3.
We can assume the real issue with the Stacks.app beta was the change mid-year 2025.
We all started with a non-working prototype of the Stack.app in 2024, that took over a year for the an update. Sometime after July the current beta was split into what I now call the public beta and the developer beta.
After the first three months the the pubic beta stopped being updated.
In a few more days it will be seven months since the release of beta 48 build (6277).
JW: My comment was to let everyone know that Stack.app is being actively being updated…
At least on the developer side. I am glad you did not have to go seven months without somekind of update.
It is, or maybe isn’t being worked on, depending on the life circumstances of the dev (fair enough). It’s in beta, only it’s not, unless you’re a dev, in which case is it, although it’s not been updated for ages, so maybe it’s not. or is. Depending on who you are. The dev isn’t really saying much, although a proxy is, who is working with it is hitting some bumps, but it’s not clear if this is the same beta as the public got, or the dev beta, and which version of either of those it actually is, or isn’t. We don’t know when it’s coming, or how close it is to coming, although the proxy thought it was going to come in Nov, but it didn’t. Although I’m not sure if that is a public beta, dev bata, or the finished product. To summarise… It maybe is or isn’t being worked on and maybe will or won’t be released at some point in the future. Maybe.
However… There is an alternative (nice pitch RM!), although it’s not really an alternative, cus it doesn’t run stacks. It’s an entirely new platform, that doesn’t like your old site, even though the new alternative is the offspring of the platform that built it.
Why is the dev so reluctant to keep people who are not developers in the loop? Even the shortest update once a month would, I’m sure, help. It’s the most strangest way to run a business I’ve ever seen.
Would I be correct in thinking it is more of a “hobby” than a business for the lead person? From my view on the sidelines, it seems Joe Workman is in the “full time business” of keeping Stacks alive and is consistent in providing information to users, with his products. Maybe he can become a partner and help with the heavy lifting that still needs to be done? With so many alternatives available, it seems to me trying to make a living with Stacks is like thinking playing miniature golf and scoring a hole in one makes you as good as a pro golfer and you can go on tour and make millions.
The only real issue is RapidWeaver classic is a legacy app that seems to be put into LTS mode. This is great since we can still use all of our old stacks plugins. It’s nice to know that I can still use RW8 to update my foundry and other abandoned stack projects.
But many of us come to realize that all of our old projects will need to be remade or converted. Yourheads undefined completion timeline, leaving some stacks users uneasy about the progress. Which then leaves a few defending developers dealing with damage control if anyone asks about updates…
So we can see the end of one thing & waiting for another to be finished, making these unsettling times for sure.
I’m a Rapidweaver/Stacks user not a developer and it does feel strange that at the start of 2026 we have no indication whatsoever of the progress or not of the ‘Stacks App’.
I know others have said this but would it really be that difficult for the developer to provide an update every few months even if it’s just a short paragraph? I don’t think that would take up much of his time.
I check the Discord channel every now and then and there’s nothing there.
There doesn’t seem to be any desire to communicate progress and I’m worried by this lack of urgency. People are moving away to alternatives of which there are many.
The public beta gave me the confidence that we will see a delivered app, and that it will deliver the functionality that we need. From Isaiah‘s point of view, it‘s undoubtedly a big undertaking. For most of us, all it needs to deliver is compatibility with our projects and stacks (most of them) and a reasonable upload engine. I see no reason why we‘re not on track for this — I think the early shipping schedules were optimistic, but I take heart that devs are happy with progress on the developer betas.
The beauty of Stacks is what it is — a templating system for HTML, CSS, JS and PHP. I‘ve said this before, but as time goes on I feel this more and more. It‘s just really cool to have an app that lets us enter values in a UI for variables in the code. Simple and smart. Still. Plus many of us have an incredible library of stacks. An investment that continues to deliver.
Stacks app doesn‘t really need to deliver more than this. There is a huge amount of potential in the way web standards have developed for more great stacks in the future, and this is one area where ‘vibe coding‘ can work well for the enthusiastic and reasonably knowledgeable amateur (especially as LLMs get their act together). So I‘m sure we‘ll see innovative new stacks developed in the future that keep this environment up-to-date with what‘s happening on the web. In the present, we have RW — and a commitment from Realmac to continue to keep it up to date with Apple releases. And if Stacks also keeps up with MacOS, we‘ll be good for years to come.
It’s been awhile!