Can RapidWeaver be used by professionals?
25/Apr/07 02:41 PM Filed in: Main Ideas
The quick answer is yes/no... that doesn’t help does it. Yes there is no reason why RapidWeaver can’t be used by professional web designers for some things, but one tool won’t always fit the bill for every situation. It really depends on what your needs are. To be honest, RapidWeaver, now at version 4, is a powerful enough tool to be used extensively by any professional and there are many situations where I might find myself using it.
There are, however, situations where a site’s architecture might be too complex for RapidWeaver to handle alone. There have been many situations in my own work on large sites where multiple navigation systems were required for different areas of the site. This is not something that RapidWeaver currently handles all that well. We have, in the past, made use of split navigation and extended that to three and four additional sets of toolbars, but in each case RapidWeaver just duplicates the entire navigation architecture but through css we only show what is needed in each area. That makes for source code that is extremely bloated.
Snippets can be extremely useful in these situations and snippets are probably the single most useful addition ever made to RapidWeaver. When managing a large site snippets can be made to help with repetitive or tedious coding work in places where RapidWeaver can’t help you. And lets not forget all of the other add-ons designed to make your RapidWeaver experience more flexible and interactive. With javascript laden plugins and smart blocks your site can get pretty advanced.
So what would prevent mw from using RapidWeaver in some of my work? Speed. I have a PHP back-end that I have designed for my particular workflow. I work in pure code. It’s how I think and how I work and it is extremely fast for me to make a site with. It’s not for the weak hearted when customer content management is concerned, but to be honest, RapidWeaver is not much better, unless my client just happens to run on Mac and just happens to have an aptitude for web design.
There are, however, situations where a site’s architecture might be too complex for RapidWeaver to handle alone. There have been many situations in my own work on large sites where multiple navigation systems were required for different areas of the site. This is not something that RapidWeaver currently handles all that well. We have, in the past, made use of split navigation and extended that to three and four additional sets of toolbars, but in each case RapidWeaver just duplicates the entire navigation architecture but through css we only show what is needed in each area. That makes for source code that is extremely bloated.
Snippets can be extremely useful in these situations and snippets are probably the single most useful addition ever made to RapidWeaver. When managing a large site snippets can be made to help with repetitive or tedious coding work in places where RapidWeaver can’t help you. And lets not forget all of the other add-ons designed to make your RapidWeaver experience more flexible and interactive. With javascript laden plugins and smart blocks your site can get pretty advanced.
So what would prevent mw from using RapidWeaver in some of my work? Speed. I have a PHP back-end that I have designed for my particular workflow. I work in pure code. It’s how I think and how I work and it is extremely fast for me to make a site with. It’s not for the weak hearted when customer content management is concerned, but to be honest, RapidWeaver is not much better, unless my client just happens to run on Mac and just happens to have an aptitude for web design.
|