Partials/Externals update

21

“My expectation is that it will become a problem for RM to solve. Reading RW Stacks project files containing Partials, Externals or Templates, into Elements, will require correct handling of those Stacks features.”

Wait, is Dan proposing that RW Elements reads Stacks project files? I thought it was just the other way around: Stacks Pro would read RW/Stacks files. Since Elements will be new, I don’t see any reason why RW Elements would need to read Stacks project files. And, tbh, Externals is a feature that never really caught on, and which is seriously broken anyway. RM would do much better to forget all of this and concentrate on giving Elements the WYSIWYG editing ability that Stacks doesn’t have.

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The only way to cure this safely is to disable externals and templates in Stacks preferences, open a new project file and copy and paste the contents from the infected file into it. Don’t have any other documents open. It’s a pain. But then the developer doesn’t see fit to fix a massive problem that has been pointed out many times, and really is more like a pernicious virus than a simple bug.

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23

No. He thinks of the Stacks pages inside RW project files.

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We really don’t know clearly what Dan is proposing yet.

I meant that Rapidweaver Elements would read Rapidweaver projects and that ignoring all Add-ons except Stacks, that some sort of project file conversion would take place to convert Stacks page into Elements.

Of course, that process would need to abort for any stacks that don’t exist as Elements. Remembering that if your Rapidweaver project has just 1 stack that does not exist as an Element , then the imported project would fail without further action.

Perhaps I’m making an assumtion here, but without any clarity on what Elements will do and won’t do yet, I would suggest that as a basic minimum requirement, most Weavers will expect to be able to import their pre Elements Rapidweaver projects into “the next version of Rapidweaver”. i.e. Elements.

Regarding the alluded to WYSIWYG feature, which has no demonstratable evidence yet, that would be a major effort requiring years of work. What has been shown is simple editing of text only from a preview window which is not WYSIWYG. That may however, be fine for simple iWeb type themes text editing.

Look at how Blocs has implemented proper grown up WYSIWYG web page editing. Also required would be some way to select, delete, move, group move, edit, etc., displayed as Layer Tree, Global Areas, Breakpoint Views, Visibility Options, etc… I’m using the Blocs terms which have existed for years and can be examined further in the Blocs documentation or tying the Blocs App trial.

Externals certainly do work AFAIK. If you are going to use Externals then care needs to be taken to avoid the side effects which most users won’t even notice. After all it took a long time after Externals was added into Stacks for it to be noticed.

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