Which is better iweb or rapidweaver

While there are definitely direct feature comparisons, we are trying to compare apples with oranges. RapidWeaver is a great tool that falls somewhere between iWeb at one end of the scale and Dreamweaver at the other end. Apple's iWeb was their first foray into personal web development software.

In true Apple fashion, the application was extremely user friendly and developed beautiful websites. However, the application was really geared towards users who wanted to create a small website to share family photos and maybe have a blog. If you ever wanted to try to steer outside the bounds of the default templates, you had to drive directly into full custom HTML. One of the biggest downsides that I came across was that once you choose the look and feel of your site, there was no going back.

If you wanted to change the theme of your website, you had to redo every single page manually! For those of you who love the drag-and-drop abilities of iWeb, look no further than the RapidWeaver Stacks plugin from YourHead Software covered later in this book. Apple has acknowledged iWeb's shortcomings by pretty much removing iWeb from its lineup. Furthermore, if you look at Apple's iLife page on their website, all traces of iWeb have been removed—if this is not a clear sign of iWeb's future, I don't know what is.

Now, let's jump to the opposite end of the spectrum with Adobe Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver has a much steeper learning curve than RapidWeaver not to mention a much steeper price tag. Dreamweaver has a lot of capability for site management and can be used collaboratively on projects, and is designed to play well with Adobe's other design software. The Adobe Creative Suite with Dreamweaver is the package of choice for very large organizational websites being developed and managed by a team, or for complex dynamic sites.

I am talking about websites such as www. For individual and small to mid-sized business websites, I can't think of a reason why one would prefer Dreamweaver to RapidWeaver. So as I stated at the beginning, RapidWeaver provides a perfect middle ground for novice web designers and geeky code lovers! So far, I have talked about the RapidWeaver application itself.

However, RapidWeaver is so much more than just an application. The user community that has been built around the RapidWeaver product is like nothing I have seen with any other application.

The RapidWeaver forums hosted by Realmac are by far the most active and useful forums that I have seen. Users and developers spend countless hours helping each other with tips and tricks on design, code, and product support. A part of the success of the strong RapidWeaver community is the strong third-party developers that exist. RapidWeaver provides a strong and flexible platform for developers to extend the application beyond its default feature set. There are currently three primary ways to extend your RapidWeaver application: Themes, Plugins, and Stacks.

As you may guess, third-party theme developers design custom themes that go above and beyond the themes that ship out of the box with RapidWeaver. With the number of amazing theme developers out there, it would be impossible not to develop a site that fits your style and looks amazing.

We will cover themes in more depth later in this book. RapidWeaver ships with 11 page styles out of the box. We will be reviewing all of these page styles throughout this book:. However, RapidWeaver plugins can create even more page styles for you. There are a plethora of different page plugins from calendars to file uploads, and shopping carts to image galleries.

I will be discussing various plugins throughout this book that will help you make your websites shine! To illustrate the power of RapidWeaver's platform, YourHead Software developed the Stacks plugin for fluid page layout.

The Stacks plugin created an entire new class of third-party RapidWeaver developer: the stack developer! A stack is simply a widget that can be used as a building block to construct your web page.

There are stacks for just about anything: animated banners, menu systems, photo galleries, or even full-blown blog integrations.

If you can dream it up, there is probably a stack for it! If you have visited my website, then you should know that my origins in the RapidWeaver community are as a Stacks Developer.

I think that Stacks is amazing and should probably be the first plugin that you should consider acquiring. Just as with plugins, I will make sure to mention stacks throughout this book that will be useful in developing your website.

Realmac Software has added a section on their website in order to make it easier for users to explore and locate useful third-party add-ons. So make sure that you go check it out and peruse through all the great themes, plugins, and stacks! In order for us to be able to build our first website, we need to download and install RapidWeaver 5 first.

If you already have RapidWeaver installed, please feel free to jump to the next section. Let's go through both options, and get you up and running. The Mac App store has become a very popular delivery channel for software. It allows you to browse through thousands of third-party applications and purchase them directly within the app. Another benefit is that it takes care of all the licensing for you, so you don't have to worry about storing your license keys any more.

Search and locate RapidWeaver using the search box at the top right-hand corner of the App Store. Once you are at the RapidWeaver page shown in the preceding screenshot simply click on the Buy button. Enter your username and password and the MAS will take care of the purchasing and installing RapidWeaver for you.

Open your Applications folder, locate RapidWeaver, and double-click to launch it. You can drag RapidWeaver onto your dock for quick access in the future as well.

You can also simply download the trial version of RapidWeaver if you just want to check it out. You can use the trial version for as long as you like. However, it is limited to just three pages. Click on the Download button to get your trial copy of RapidWeaver. Once the download is complete, open the ZIP file found in your Downloads folder. Drag RapidWeaver. So now we are going to jump into the deep end and create our first website.

The website project that we are starting here will be built upon as we work through this book. At the end of this section, we will have a fully functional website that can be viewed on your local computer.

Pay attention to the steps in this section because we are going to be repeating them a lot throughout this book. Let's get started by simply opening up RapidWeaver, if you have not done so already. If you followed the installation instructions in the previous section, you will be able to find RapidWeaver.

When you first open RapidWeaver, you will be presented with the RapidWeaver projects window. This window serves multiple purposes. We can easily access the last four projects that we have opened. We also have convenient links to Realmac Software's Add-ons and Tutorials websites. However, what we are concerned about right now is creating a new project. Note that this window will automatically open up every time you launch RapidWeaver.

However, if you uncheck the box in the lower left-hand corner, you can disable this behavior. Now that we have a new RapidWeaver document open, let's go ahead and click on the Site Setup in the middle of the window in order to set up some details about our new website.

We can now enter the basic information about our website in the Site Setup window. RapidWeaver inserts default information for us here. Overwrite these details with the pertinent information about your website. When you have completed the General setup form, go ahead and save your data by clicking on the OK button. Let's now add our first web page by clicking on the Add Page button. Could you please elaborate a little about the precise place in RW that I put in a foldername of my own choosing.

I can not make it work. Thanks a lot. But it is still not working. I have attatched a couple of screenshots. And one showing a FTP view of my Website right after publishing a few minutes ago - and as you can see there is no such folder, and the file index.

Please post a screen shot of your publishing settings and your project page view so we can see the hierarchy of your site as it is in RW.

Comming up. So I have two, for me very important, questions: Is there an easy way to migrate iWeb sites to RapisWeaver Does Rapid Weaver offer the possibility to wrap text around pictures Hoping for your help. Best regards Peter. Log in Register. Search titles only. Search Advanced search…. New posts. Log in. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.

Thread starter hanguolaohu Start date Oct 29, Joined Dec 3, Messages 34 Reaction score 0 Points 6. I want to create a website with a blog that has the ability to add comments and easily insert photos or video. I've been debating back and forth about using iWeb '09, Rapidweaver or Wordpress. Wordpress seems the most customizable but I'm somewhat intimidated how complicated it is to simply insert a video.