Several people have asked this question … I was an early adopter of RapidWeaver, participated in the forums at the Realmac site as a contributor and moderator, and built several websites with RapidWeaver (RW). I became known as one of the “go-to” guys for help with embedding PHP solutions in RW sites to extend its capabilities. But about a year ago, I started moving in the direction of WordPress, and now develop exclusively on the WordPress platform. Here are the reasons why (consolidated from a farewell thread I posted to on the Realmac forums)
The personal issues I have with RW are:
- I can’t update client or personal sites from my iPad
- CMS options for RW are limited in flexibility and scope
- It doesn’t empower clients to maintain their own sites
- Integrating third-party scripts/DBs is clumsy and inelegant
Some people like working on the maintenance end of things, keeping things running that they or others have created. I don’t. I like teaching and mentoring much more than maintenance, so I can empower my clients to take control of their own sites. RW’s not a particularly good platform for this model because of 2-4 above. From a business perspective, RW is great for someone who wants to take on clients and continue maintaining their sites for them indefinitely. But that’s not where I’m at, and I also don’t want to maintain partially hand-coded PHP solutions for folks like I’ve done in the past.
Enter WordPress … which has become a full-blown CMS that is ideal for the small to medium sized business. I worked with Drupal for some time, and that’s a great CMS solution for the enterprise … but it’s overkill for the kind of sites people have engaged me to do. There was a point at which I had to ask myself: what did RW give me over WordPress with the right plugins and themes? I couldn’t come up with a good answer.
I own two theme frameworks for WordPress: Genesis and Builder. The latter is sort of the WordPress equivalent of Stacks. I also have learned to program custom content types and behaviors with a plugin called Pods CMS, and with Pods, Genesis, and Builder in my toolkit (and with other powerful plugins like BuddyPress and bbPress), I can do more than I could do with RW and deliver a sophisticated and complex solution to my clients.
For the small number of sites that are beyond WordPress’ capabilities, there’s Drupal or Joomla … and those clients I’ll refer out, since I don’t really want to get into providing enterprise solutions of that level of complexity. Though I’d do a SharePoint 2010 or MediaWiki solution for someone if they needed it, since I’ve become adept at working with those platforms in my 9 to 5 job. Same with developing eLearning solutions using Articulate Studio since I’ve been engaged in a heavy investigation of eLearning in my current 9 to 5 job. Again, this isn’t something RW is particularly good at.
So, no negatives toward RW; it’s just not for me given the type of clients I want to work with and the kind of support I want to provide them. It’s more a matter of personality type than anything else: I believe some people are wired to prefer working on the creative end of things, and become quickly bored working in “maintenance mode”; others are wired to prefer the stability and predictability of “maintenance mode”. I’m more of the former than the latter … and for me a CMS like WordPress makes more sense.
Someone asked: would Stacks 2 with its embedded CMS capabilities change things for me?
I’m afraid it doesn’t. The vendor of Stacks (Nimblehost) wrote: “Imagine being able login to your own RW site from anywhere, add and edit content, control when that content is published, upload media, and create new users — all without needing to subscribe to any third party monthly service!” Well, I can do all that and more in WordPress. I’m sure it will be a great product for some, but it doesn’t address my issues 3 and 4 above.
Even if Nimblehost (who I greatly admire) comes up with a great CMS that integrates well with RW I have to ask: what’s the point? There are hundreds of CMS platforms out there, and WordPress is one of the Big Dogs. WordPress is a major platform that powers 22 percent of new active websites in the USA. It’s an open source platform that has thousands of developers supporting it with themes and plugins. I feel more comfortable putting my energy into the WordPress ecosystem, than into a specialized CMS built by a small company to run on a web design platform developed by another small company.
My personal belief is: the day of running software on your Mac or PC to develop websites has come and gone, and Mac/PC based applications like Sandvox and RW will within a decade go the way of the dinosaurs. Applications like DreamWeaver and BBEdit will remain, because there will always be a need for custom development … at least to some degree. But I believe the future belongs to the CMS like WordPress and Drupal, and there’s no real advantage to my continuing to use RW and its plugins and themes, when everything I need (features, plugins, themes) can be found in WordPress. Again, this is a personal opinion I’ve come to after a lot of thought. It’s no reflection on the quality of work fine folks at Nimblehost and Realmac do, but for someone who follows a business model like mine, RW doesn’t make sense any more.
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I like the way you think and would appreciate a little advice for my future ideas. Thanks
Hello, i think that i saw you visited my site thus i came to “return the favor”.
I’m attempting to find things to improve my web site!I suppose its ok to use a few of your ideas!!
Interesting article. I have just invested in RapidWeaver after using Dreamweaver 10+ years for my website production. However I am seeing many flaws with RW that I am not sure will ever be remedied and is causing me a bit of buyers anxiety with all the money I have put into it.
RW, I think, at best, is a mediocre site creator. It crashes often, is a memory hog, and allows for no easy HTML or CSS editing, except for round about methods. It is notoriously unruly with the vast amount of developers cranking out Stacks addons that many times end up in conflict with each other. Can’t tell you how many times RW pages, with even two jQuery utilizing Stacks, tanks in some version of IE for me.
Create a RW site and then when the updates for themes, Stacks, and Stacks addons occurs, be prepared that your previously fine-tuned site will fall apart on some level. I have so many occurrences of having whole sections of web pages disappear from some anomaly, even in my short time with RW. Never happened with the more professional level Dreamweaver. With so many solo/independent RW developers, no wonder there is so much problem. Realmac needs to dial them in.
I think a valid point made here, is one could not easily pass off a RW created site to an owner or business to continually update. I agree, WP is superior to that end.
I got on board with RW, primarily because of Stacks and the prevalence of Stacks addons. There is a robust RW community that keeps RW humming. Without Stacks and Stacks developers, I wouldn’t even consider RW.
I guess my strategy is to develop as many tools as possible. For clients who do not want to maintain their sites, RW is a great tool with so many Stacks addons, so almost anything can be accomplished. It allows for very quick site production with all the bells and whistles. For clients who want to take over their site, I agree, WordPress is a better solution. Meanwhile, I will keep my Dreamweaver skills alive and well. Dreamweaver, with all its complexity, rarely lets me down and is truly the professional’s website solution.
Hi Juergen,
Three years is a long time in this field. … and back in that time frame, I was warning about the approach Realmac was taking with its theme and plugin environment, and the instabilities that were clearly arising in the product as a result of this unconstrained “ecosystem”. I argued for greater control over the API on Realmac’s part. And as I struggled with trying to understand where RapidWeaver fit into the problem domain, it increasingly became clear that patching in CMS capabilities with tools like WebYep and Pulse was a half-assed way to go about things. (I also think Realmac has gone off in too many directions since then, but that’s a different conversation).
But in the three years since, a lot has happened in the WordPress camp too … its maturing into a full-blown CMS with version 3.0 (2010), the advent of Pods CMS which provides sophisticated custom content capabilities. And powerful frameworks became possible with the integration of child themes in 3.0, as well. These three things are real game changers, and they make WordPress a worthy opponent in the CMS war.
Note the time frame … I don’t recall my ardent defense back then, but RapidWeaver, the web design field, WordPress, and my business have all changed in the past three years. If you want bragging rights … that you were right all along … well, it’s not the same world that it was back then, and given where things were at in 2009, I think my position might have made sense then.
If you’ve got a link to that old thread, though, I’d be curious to read it and see where I was at back then.
Dear Vasily
You can see me here with a grin from ear to ear.
)
)
Three years or so I uttered my critique about RW – while you defended it ardendly.
Reading your article I see shimmering through the lines my “old” arguments.
Kind regards
Juergen