Good day. My name is Dave and I have started the process of converting a circa 2000-era website I built (using Macromedia Dreamweaver) into a modern site, using Rapidweaver 9 Classic and Stacks 5. Here is the site:
About 7 years ago, I built three sites using RW6 I think? So I’m familiar with RW and did use some Stacks back then. But that was years ago and I’m rusty as heck :/
I have been advised to use Stacks web pages as much as possible and was brought up to speed about the directions the two companies are headed (Stacks Pro and Rapidweaver Elements.)
I need advice on which Stacks to consider for large sections of my site. They are:
The Showroom. This part has 275 individual pages, with photos and text in an old matrix-like format.
The Guest Gallery. This part has well over 700 pages with a lot of photos of special car models (called “showrods”), submitted by members of our little community. I intend to grow this section to over 1,000 pages in the next 3-4 years.
I’m not concerned about the other parts of the site–I think I can find what I want from them, either in RW directly or in Stacks. It’s these two big, photo-laden sections I could use some advice on.
FYI–I don’t need “free stuff”. I have American money to support my hobby ;) I don’t think browsing and evaluating 800 stacks is a good way to approach this problem. However, I have been given this link which really is nice:
By the way, at a minimum, I’d like to add a search feature to my new site, that only searches my site. Any recommendations on that are also appreciated–DR
I’m not going to try to answer all your questions, but for searching (and other things) you probably want to check out the brand new Content Filter and Easy Grid stacks. More on this forum here: 2 new stacks....Filter and Easy Grid! - #7 by habitualshaker
I think Dave wants a true search stack, are there any available?
The site he wants to convert has around a 1000 pages. Can Rapidweaver/Stacks handle that? I recall reading about sites with large page counts slowing Rapidweaver down.
The photo count is very high. Several thousand! The drag-and-drop method of adding photos will presumably choke Rapidweaver with that many. I think the only way to go with that many images is to use warehousing.
Very interesting post. I’m in a similar position converting a current 1150 page e-commerce site (abthermal.com) from a PC authoring tool (X5) that is struggling when publishing to some other tool… so the post from Gort has me worried.
I was trying to see if I could stay with a page per content approach as opposed to a CMS for SEO purposes, not sure if I’m living in a misconception but my experience with one cart based site (firesleeveusa.com running cs-cart) was the SEO organic performance wasn’t great.
Anyway, I just finished trialing Nicepage (unique as it offers PC, Mac and Browser based editing of the same project), but it has basically “failed” at 500 sample pages by slowing down to unuseabilty.
Now investigating if RW classic will do the job. If I have to go CMS route I think my choice would be Dynamic Content for the data management side combined with VC Pro for the cart side.
Can we please address the elephant in the room? Dave intends to build a 1000+ page site. I for one am really curious if that is even possible with Rapidweaver/Stacks? I would like to invoke the names of some of the most knowledgeable folks that might know: @joeworkman@habitualshaker@Jannis@tav@RapidWeaver
It’s possible and I have seen projects that large. I have cured the insanity of some of those users by convincing them to migrate to Total CMS. 100x less pages. It really is the best way to build out a large project like that. Separate the content (well, most of it) from the design.
Update: I’m being funny here but also 100% serious.
It’s not really about whether its possible or not, anything is possible with enough tolerance for poor performance and complex working patterns.
Clearly, RW/Stacks is not the best tool for a 1000+ page site but I’m not sure what is, given that @AMB says that he doesn’t want a CMS based solution. With such a large site and no CMS then really the only solution would be a templated system using hand coding.
Throw into that the e-commerce requirement and it would really seem like a dedicated e-commerce platform would be most appropriate and cost effective in both time to author and ongoing maintenance.
I’d highly recommend Total CMS for a site like this. It will allow you to build out a nice template design, and have an admin area to upload and add more post to the showroom and guest gallery. The best thing about Total CMS, is that when you when to redesign, you are designing 2 pages that will make all those pages (show room/guest gallery) change. It’s easy to manage and you will thank yourself in the long run.
I also provide 1-to1 training if you ever need help moving forward. Just message me or check out My site.
Thank you Joe. I’m going to look at TotalCMS and EasyCMS. I’m good with being limited to text and images if that is what EasyCMS can do? (and yes, I’m drawn to the word “Easy” in that name ;)
Thank you Joshua. I have reviewed your site and find your training prices reasonable and will most likely sign up for an initial session in a week or so.
I’d be interested in a short video (or a bit of written documentation) where you’d specifically address this way of using Total CMS. I’m an Easy CMS user myself (well, I have it but i’ve not deployed it except for a few test projects), and am having trouble imagining how to set Total CMS up this way.
I would guess it’s using the blog function to create pseudo “pages” instead of blog posts. There are options in TCMS to use the Layout rule for a blog post, so that things can look a little bit different depending on various options, but they are limited.
I wouldn’t say limited, I have built a large amount of sites that have used “blog” for an event calendar, products for store, online courses store, food order menu with f6 form. It’s actually pretty flexible. It does take a little imagination to put it into play, but most things are doable.