Opportunity for Stacks App

Stacks
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Well this whole Realmac pricing and censorship situation is an opportunity for Stacks App to make its mark.

Blocs is great for what it does. But it does not yet have the full depth of features that Stacks has through its developer base. Wordpress is always an option and continues to get easier to use though still very much like using a Jack hammer to drive a tack into a cork board.

That said, people are fed up with the RW system. They are leaving in a hurry and “figuring” out other ways to design “good enough” websites without the drama. I do hope some form of Stacks App is close or this game might be over.

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Agreed with the first half of the sentence, but things aren’t quite that dire yet. As far as I can tell RW8 works great still with everything out there. It will be a while before things start breaking.

Creating a brand new application like that must be a massive undertaking for YourHead.

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According to this post it’s not quite there yet but going to private testing in a few weeks.

Also a new paid upgrade to Stacks, with new features, is also due ina few weeks.

Realmac’s decisions feel a bit abrupt/erratic, changing to a subscription mode fair enough but to do with so little fanfare or warning is odd.

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Yes, My Goodness… What is going on with Realmac…? I am feeling sad that the way they behave is very criticisable. Not only do they try to lever the success of Isiaahs Stacks plugin, but now they also try to profit from users that have supported them for all these years. I really hope that Isaiah will finish the new Stackapps, I am not too much concerned with the time that will take, I can live with Realmacs idiosyncrasies until then. I also use Oxygen for WP, but that is much more cumbersome than working with Rapidweaver and Stacks, and I cannot do nearly all of the things that I can do with the stacks that I have accumulated. I have a ton of stacks that have cost me quite a substantial amount of money. I actually keep buying stacks to support the living thriving and helpful developers that we are so fortunate to have. The Rapidweaver community is a rare gem that we have to sustain. In contrast, I found Realmac was always too focused on profit according to my opinion. That is no news to me, but they tried to hide that fact until recently…

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The problem for Realmac is that they ended up, through lethargy and underinvestment, with an application that has become merely an ftp client for Stacks. All of the smarts were in Stacks — and stacks — while most of the irritating constraints were in RW. It’s very hard to see how they can turn this around now, when there is a large catalogue of stacks but they have failed, through their repeated misreading of people’s loyalties, to generate interest in developing ‘elements’. Once a company turns their user-base against them, they’re doomed.

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So, do we know for certain that RW Classic won’t continue to work with all the plugins out there, including Stacks? I’m good with RW8 and Stacks for the immediate future, and would prefer the RW + Stacks approach, upgrading only when I need some new feature, and I thought the whole idea of RW Classic was to continue to make that approach available to users.

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Actually, the issue is now the other way around — will Stacks continue to support RW? That seems unlikely as Stacks 5.0 will be a stand-alone app. And I’ve seen no suggestion there will be a ‘Stacks Classic’ which will work in RW. So RW Classic is constrained by how much longer anyone wants to run Stacks 4.x on RW (and, tbh, you might as well run Stacks 4.x on RW8 and not pay for the upgrade or the subscription).

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I agree. Only new potential customers who have not heard about Stacks App might missguidedly, buy into RW Classic. RM don’t exactly promote Stacks or indeed the 1000’s of addons, so who knows. I can’t imagine any sensible new user, aware of Stacks App, would then choose Classic plus an additional Addon (Stacks). Some RW users may want to upgrade to use Stacks but that must be a small market.

I don’t recall pricing being discussed, but the cost of Stacks App vs RW Classic + Stacks 4 will be an interesting revelation.

I just don’t see that RW Classic will get to play in the game anymore.

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There was a mention by Isaiah on a troubleshooting thread on the Realmac forum (followed by a with tweet and big news from Dan), that a new paid version of Stacks was coming to RW (I presume 8 and Classic) in a few weeks.

Haven’t seen anything more about it but Stacks 4.5/5 is meant to be here soon and I guess would support both RW8/C and Stacksapp when it launches.

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It’s a real shame, but it’s made me realise my reliance on a single piece of software. I decided to just take courses in html, css, js and am moving on to php.

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Stacks (let’s leave RW out of it, since it has really just become an FTP client for Stacks) is a great environment for anyone who knows some html, css and js. It will become even better if it becomes easier to make stacks (creating an interface in a plist is a little cumbersome, even if the rest is fine) and if stacks were to become more ‘object oriented’, able to interact with each other (Splider, with its powerful API, is a good example of what stacks could become). But then Stacks will be in a very different market to RW, which really just set out to be a simple theme-based website creator — a genre which really ended with the pulling of Apple’s iWeb in 2011.

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I am watching the space now for years, and sometimes the power users, who even push Stacks over the limit, forget about the environment RW was build for and still is used in. The active community might be looking like that all is about Stacks, but that might not to be true (I don’t have any numbers, but the silent customerbase usually is the larger one)

I’ve seen the stunts of RM and YD,and in my oppinion, both didn’t very well. I am not buying into the ecosystem, I use RW/Stacks for fun side projects and quick prototypes for my web and app development, but I am pretty sure that I am not changing the whole system for a new app, which needs a couple of years of development of getting solid and mature. Not an easy task for a one man show!

Keep in mind, if you want to use your existing RW Projects to the S5 App, it needs to be able to open your project file (reverse engineer the file format), support RW Themes (it might be surprising, but not all Stacks are embedded in Foundry and Foundation projects), the Global Settings (General, Web Icons, Advanced, Privacy, Code, Master Style…), the Resource Management, RW Macros, all the page settings, banner settings, attributes, sidebar, Metas and so on…

And what about existing page types / add ons in RW? The users, who use the RW Blog in their pages, do they have to migrate to Blog-Stacks, and do the stacks offer migrations? I personally use a lot of plain HTML pages as containers, I might be out of luck, too.

Not really, Pinegrow, Bootstrap Studio, Hype and the others are still out there and doing fine. But to be fair, Wordpress and it’s ecosystem has taken over (especially with Divi and Elementor)

Oh yes… totally… I couldn’t agree more.

I am pretty happy to pay the 50 bucks a year for RW and I am more than happy to pay for a Stacks plugin upgrade, if the Major release brings anything worthwile!

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Let’s talk about the elephant in the room: RW9 and “Elements”. That’s why the whole discussion has started.

So at the end, the whole Eco System is “screwed” now:

  • We have the existing customer base with RW8 / RWC and the Stacks Plugin, risking that the Plugin is not getting updated (my guess)
  • Stacks App wich is very likely not 100% compatible with existing RW projects (my guess)
  • Rapid Weaver 9 with its own Elements which might be able to migrate Stacks pages, but a new API requires Stack developers to publish new Elements.

I am pretty sure RW9 w/ Elements is already around here as an early alpha or beta, so some of the better known Stack developers will have insight (but can’t share them, of course).

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It’s an open file format.

On the plan.

No, really not everything is required.

Its called Stacks App. The answer is obvious.

I really don’t think so.

Stacks App doesn’t want to be a replacement for RW. It wants to be a replacement for the Stacks Plugin inside RW, and that’s a big difference.

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I don’t share your pessimism.

RW8 and Stacks are just as good (if not better) than before that craziest of announcements that Dan made in March. There have been new versions of Stacks and an actual new major version just around the corner. More has happened with stacks than RW.

I don’t see any point in guessing what Stacks will or won’t be. All the indications are better than most developers expected and the confidence in Isaiah is high.

RW9 with Elements does not exist. The March fantasy announcement from Dan was that Elements would be demoed in the coming weeks. That was nearly 6 months ago. That was of course before almost every current Stacks developer expressed that they woudl have nothing to do with Elements and many developers have taken steps to stop their stacks from being hacked to work in Elements.

If I was to take an educated guess, Elements has died an embarrassing death, and Classic has become the replacement recurring revenue stream that Dan was chasing with the illguided madness of Elements.

It doesn’t exist other than in the mind of one person who has now moved onto other things.

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Ah. My fault, I thought there was a early alpha for 12-18 months now (wasn’t it you who told me?), so there’s a bit of more insight.

I believe people think that they can open their Rapid Weaver projects and migrate them flawlessly.

Don’t tell me, tell it the users who might think that it’s just a stripped down RW with Stacks only features.

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No, I didn’t see anything from Elements.

Exactly.

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So RW9 is around, but no Elements?

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No, nothing. For me this is only vaporware.

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Isaiah did not pull any stunts. For the record, he very much took a back seat as Dan pulled stunt after stunt. No point going over what Dan did but plenty here have the screen grabs that document it.

What Dan should do is just come clean and kill off the idea of Elements and focus on Classic with an ongoing commitment to Stacks. That will limit some of the damage but will do nothing to dent the fervent demand for Stacks App.