RealMac Software's RapidWeaver 3.2: High-Speed Template-Based CSS Web Site Development Software

reviewed by Mike Swope

What IS RapidWeaver?

RapidWeaver is a template-based web site development application modeled after Apple's award-winning iApps (iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD, iChat) so that it is somewhat familiar to Mac OS X users. RapidWeaver produces valid XHTML 1.0 and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Level 1 and Level 2 web sites. Both are modern web standards and becoming ever more popular with web designers and developers for the features and control they provide over a site's appearance and, in some cases, interactivity, such as cascading menus.

RapidWeaver ships with 25 templates (some are samples from 3rd party theme developers which must be installed before they can be used) and 10 page styles with which to build web sites. A few of the templates are identical except for minor differences, but all templates are professionally designed (like Apple's iDVD themes) and provide superb results. They range from a template resembling Apple's tabbed web site to multi-colored sites. If no one knew your site was a template, no one would be the wiser. The 10 page styles also offer some variety for different types of web pages, including blog, contact form, file sharing, photo album, HTML, and styled text. The fully configurable contact form requires PHP on the site host and will not work with .Mac accounts. PHP is a common feature on Unix and Linux-based web hosts. The blog page style is also advanced and supports Podcasts!

Once pages are built, RapidWeaver can upload them to the specified FTP account, making the pages available to the world. However, for those who wish to upload using an FTP application (such as Transmit, RapidWeaver also allows for local export for testing and uploading. Of course, we can't forget Apple's .Mac. Like Apple's iApps, RapidWeaver is configured to work flawlessly with .Mac accounts. (The only recorded feature that can't be used with a .Mac site is the PHP Contact Form because .Mac doesn't support PHP for its members.)

For web designers who also work in print design and use QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign, RapidWeaver's method will be familiar. RapidWeaver uses Page and Site Inspectors to set page and site specific preferences, and then publishes designer-selected content, including text and images, to create pages and documents. This means that the site's content can be anywhere on the designer's hard drive and RapidWeaver will publish it to the specified web host space (.Mac or FTP).

RapidWeaver, like some other web development software (most notably Freeway, uses Inspectors to set page and site preferences. The Page Inspector has 4 panes. Users can alter many aspects of each page individually, including filename, menu name, folder path, image format (Original, JPG or PNG), whether to display the page in the site menu or not, output (Default, Tidied, or Optimized), encoding (Unicode or Western), Title, Slogan, Copyright, Sidebar content, change settings within the selected theme, insert meta tag information (anything the user desires), upload selected assets (not necessarily displayed in the page), and enter custom CSS code or link to other CSS page(s) and enter JavaScript code.

The Site Inspector similarly controls default aspects of pages in the site (page inspector settings override Site Inspector settings). Like the Page Inspector, the Site Inspector has 4 panes. Users set default Site Title, Slogan, Copyright statement, index page filename, enable site logo and favicon, specify page extension, output format (Default, Tidied or Optimized), image format (Original, JPG or PNG), default sidebar content, default meta tags, whether to preview on the local machine and/or in RapidWeaver (even processing PHP in RapidWeaver preview mode), and publishing preferences.

Page Styles

When a page is first added to a RapidWeaver site, the user must decide what kind of page the page will be. For example, the user must choose to make the page a blog, a photo album, a contact form, a page from which users download files, an iFrame page, a movie album, etc.

Blog: Like photo galleries, blogs are becoming increasingly popular. A blog (short for web log) is a personal log in which people publish their thoughts about whatever they wish. Naturally, everyone has an opinion, but blogging can be cathartic and a great deal of fun to boot. I might even say addictive. It's hard to resist expressing your opinion to the world where someone of like mind may read and respond. RapidWeaver's Blog Page Style is just one way to publish a great looking blog easily. As with many of RapidWeaver's features, users have great control over their blog pages. User can create categories and assign them to individual entries. Entries are automatically dated and are listed on the page most recent first. Users may also add links to selected text in their blog, and add images, too. RapidWeaver's blog pages also support RSS 2.0 and PodCasts as well. As one might expect, PodCasts link up to the user's iTunes library. Both RSS feeds and PodCasting are advanced features and welcome inclusions in RapidWeaver's blog page style. The resourceful RapidWeaver user may find alternative uses for blogs, such as posting a chronological listing of reviews and articles as I've done.

Contact Form: Selecting this Page Style automatically creates a PHP-based contact form. The Contact Form Page Style is surprisingly powerful, supporting six different field types and allowing users to completely customize the information they receive from this form. The Contact Form Page Style supports text fields, text areas, checkboxes, popup menus, radio buttons and even attachments! Users may also specify which fields are required to successfully submit the form. At creation, the Contact Form contains the following fields:  Name, Email, Subject and Message. When customized, the final contact form may contain as many of the six types of fields as desired. In fact, this page style is so flexible and easy to use, I've used it to create a reservation form and contact form for another web site than my own and just used the code produced by RapidWeaver in the other site's design. My forms were completed in just minutes with this approach. The manual approach would have taken easily twice as long!

File Sharing: Sometimes users have the need to share files with the public. To do this, RapidWeaver offers the File Sharing Page Style, which works similarly to the Blog Page Style. Users simply enter a Title and Description and select the file to be uploaded. When the site is next published to the web server, the page and shared files are uploaded automatically, ready to be shared.

Movie Album: For those who make movies on their Macs and want to share them, this Page Style is ideal. Any QuickTime compatible movie can be used in the Album, but RapidWeaver looks first in the user's Movie folder. The user can use any movie found there, or navigate to any other drive and use whatever QuickTime compatible movie file they wish. Users may add as many movies as they desire. Movies are not altered by RapidWeaver, so movies must be ready for the web when inserted into the Movie Album. RapidWeaver publishes all the movies in an album format. On the live Movie Album page, clicking a movie opens that movie into a popup window. Users can add a Page Title and description text to explain the album. They can also select which frame to display in the album and set movies to autoplay.

Photo Album: Photo galleries are becoming increasingly more popular due to increasing availability and falling prices of digital cameras. This page style links up directly to the user's local iPhoto galleries but allows for great control over the output on the web site, including image quality, output (HTML or Flash slideshow), image size, captions, thumbnail layout, and navigation text (typically Home, Previous and Next). Only one photo album can be selected per Photo Album page. So if users have more than one album in iPhoto they wish to post with RapidWeaver, the user will have to create that many Photo Album pages and select a different album for each page. This can be cumbersome if the user will be posting very many photo albums. Of course, it also takes some time to process and upload these images. Oh, and the Flash slideshow is pretty slick, too, and processes faster than expected.

QuickTime: The QuickTime Page Style overlaps Movie Album somewhat, in that both allow users to publish QuickTime compatible movies to their web sites. The QuickTime style, however, is used to publish a single movie with accompanying text rather than a group of movies and simple captions. As with the Movie Album style, users can set the QuickTime movie to autoplay.

HTML Code and Styled Text Page Styles: These two page styles should not be underestimated. HTML code allows programmers to completely insert HTML, PHP and ASP code into the <body> of the published page, packaged by the template selected in RapidWeaver. When using HTML Code, users must know the link to the pages and assets to which they link. The HTML style is a code editor. Styled Text allows users to similarly insert text, photos, etc. into the <body> of the published page. In the Styled Text style, users control text and images on their page. Control over images includes placement, alternate text, alignment, filename, scaling, rotation, and flipping. Control over text includes standard HTML formatting such as alignment, color, size, paragraph, blockquote, etc. Curiously missing from Styled Text formatting is the ability to create a list! For the most part, if you can't accomplish what you need in the other Page Styles offered by RapidWeaver, you can in one of these two!

Oddities & Gotchas

Some Trouble Getting Started: I've been building web sites for more than 10 years (including familiarity with Cascading Style Sheets or CSS), but I couldn't just jump right in with RapidWeaver. Getting Started, in fact, was not rapid at all! I could view the themes, and insert a page into the RapidWeaver console, but I couldn't apply a theme to the page (or so I thought). I finally broke down and read the RapidWeaver Getting Started guide (PDF). Like I tell my children, you have to read the instructions (RTFM - Read The Freakin' Manual). They aren't provided for nothing! So read RapidWeaver's Getting Started guide. You'll be glad you did. RapidWeaver resembles the iApps more than I first realized. Don't make it harder than it really is!

Links, System Clipboard & Blog Page Style: As I was rebuilding my personal freelance web site, I discovered that any HTML link that I had copied to the System clipboard was automatically applied when I began typing text in a blog page, as if I had selected that text and pasted the link in the link dialogue box. Eerie.  I also learned that when copying and pasting links w/ text in blog pages, the links are removed and must be reset. Both are bothersome if doing much copying and pasting at all in blogs.

Page Styles: Must be selected when first creating a page, and cannot be changed afterward. The only way to correct the erroneous page style is to delete the page that has been created and create it again with the correct page style. A minor irritation. Perhaps, the Page Style should be changed in the inspector, and the <body> content for that page automatically deleted, leaving the Inspector settings untouched, so the user can begin again as easily as possible.

Contact Form Fields: Though the Contact Form is fully customizable, it is not easy to change the order of choices for Popup Menus. They are listed in the order they are entered, and clicking and dragging them does not rearrange them. So far as I have determined, there isn't any way to rearrange the options effectively. The options must be deleted and recreated in the desired order. It would work well to be able to click-and-drag the options to rearrange their order, the method used for similar interfaces throughout RapidWeaver.

Images: Images are an important element of all web sites. Generally RapidWeaver does a fair job of handling them. However, information about images is missing from RapidWeaver's online help. Which formats does RapidWeaver support, import and convert to JPG or PNG (as specified in the Page Inspector)? Though RapidWeaver will correctly display EPS images visually in Edit mode, when previewed or published only a text link is present. No image at all. A simple list of file formats that RapidWeaver will display AND repurpose for display in a web page would be helpful. In addition, it would be helpful if users of RapidWeaver had greater control over the quality of the final images, a la Freeway http://www.softpress.com.

Incredible Potential! No Better Web Design Deal for $34.95!

RapidWeaver has great potential and a talented and productive development team. In the time that 3.2 was released for review and I had downloaded it and completed this review, RealMac Software developed 3.5 with new features, more templates, and more, announced at MacWorld ‘06! Elapsed time: 6 weeks! Holy smokes! RealMac stretches their $34.95/license for RapidWeaver to its absolute limit! You won't get more bang for your buck anywhere else! (And I haven't but mentioned that experienced CSS web developers can create their own templates without too much difficulty!)

RealMac Software previewed RapidWeaver 3.5, a free upgrade for 3.2 owners, at MacWorld on December 10th. Though it is still 60 days or so to release, RapidWeaver 3.5 looks very promising. Not only does 3.5 dispense with most if not all of the aforementioned weaknesses, it also offers new functionality. Of course, RealMac Software has been mum about many of these, but they let a few slip through that I can publish with their blessing. The Blogs and photo pages will incorporate perma-link, or permanent links, so links to RapidWeaver blogs and photos don't grow stale in search engines. The link panel will now also list blog entries and photos so that users can easily link to them from other pages in their RapidWeaver site. Blog archive and category pages will also be themed. RapidWeaver 3.5 will also offer a WYSIWYG table editor (CSS does not replace tables for tabular information). RapidWeaver 3.5 will also be released to run on Apple's Intel-based Macs! Did I mention that 3.5 will be a free upgrade to 3.2 users?

You can be absolutely certain that Steve Jobs and crew are watching developers like RealMac Software, just as they always have. The announcement of iWeb (a new iApp) at MacWorld SF 2006 confirms that Apple's watching what their customers and developers are doing. iWeb, however, apparently requires a $99/year .Mac account to publish its content. iWeb, after all, is designed to publish the other iLife files (music, photos, movies). Until iWeb can publish by FTP to other standard web hosts,  RapidWeaver is the missing iApp from Apple's award-winning iLife family.

RapidWeaver 3.2 earns 5 out of 5. It is a fine application. It is powerful, effective, easy and fun to use. It has few shortcomings. It anticipates users' needs -- and delivers on them in a surprisingly big way. It could nearly replace Apple's .Mac service! And potentially some of the better-known, more expensive web design packages (GoLive, Dreamweaver, FrontPage, Freeway). Most certainly, they are now definitely overkill for small web sites. Some superb web sites http://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/rwshowcase/ -- some good enough to receive awards, I have no doubt -- have been built and maintained with RapidWeaver, and will continue to be built and maintained with RapidWeaver 3.5, a free upgrade to licensed users of RapidWeaver 3.2.

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