Thanks for a great review!

I am thinking of switching to Mac and was exploring the website building software options of Mac, I bumped in to RW but couldn’t find a good review, until I came here

Your review makes it very clear, and the RW – WP comparison is spot on! Just like many other I currently uses WP AND Dreamweaver.

Thanks again!

Peter

“I’m a lead developer at Realmac Software working on RapidWeaver, and I just wanted to say thanks for writing the comparison of RapidWeaver vs WordPress, and painting RapidWeaver in a good light. Good publicity is a lot better than bad publicity .

I just wanted to make two quick comments about your review. You write that your wife is experiencing crashes:

“However, she has faced some problems with the app crashing while she’s trying to publish changes to her site. She’s taken to closing down all other running programs on the Mac when she’s uploading content, which she says helps. She also notes that publishing times can be quite slow, and the site itself is pretty slow on the initial load. These issues have gotten worse as her site has grown.”

First, please make sure that you’re using the latest version of RapidWeaver (3.6.5 as of this writing; 3.6.6 should be appearing within a few weeks). We fixed a lot of publishing bugs and memory leaks that could have resulted in RapidWeaver crashing or slowing down your Mac.

Second, if RapidWeaver crashes, please please send us the crash report — there should be a window that appears after RapidWeaver crashes asking if you’d like to send a crash report to us. Without crash reports, we have zero knowledge that these crashes are happening, and they contain essential information for us to try to fix the problem. So please send them!

Third, we’re doing a lot of work for RapidWeaver 4.0 to make it deal better with large Web sites. I’m quite blown away by the sheer size of some websites that use RapidWeaver — we have some sites with literally thousands of blog entries, and well over two hundred pages. The design of the original versions of RapidWeaver were never really meant to scale that large, and it’s a small miracle that RapidWeaver still works with sites that big. 4.0 should scale to larger sites much more nicely!

For example, imagine you want your home page to list your top three newest posts. Above and below this, you wish to add some static content — but you still want your main blog to be a separate page in your site. This isn’t easy to do.

As you’ve noted, Blocks is a great solution to this, but it’s probably overkill for a lot of pages where you want just a little bit of different content mixed in with a main content area. We have some novel ideas for making this a lot better in future versions of RapidWeaver, but we’ve currently got our hands full trying to get 4.0 out the door. I hope that in about six months’ or a years’ time, you’ll see some very good progress in being able to create more “mixed-content” websites. Who knows, maybe we’ll be able to tempt you into switching back from Wordpress .

Cheers!
Andre.

I really love using MarsEdit for this site, by the may. It really makes it easy to draft up my posts.

Even though I agree about some of the limitations of RW, I think it’s also one of its strengths. I have recently had to do a very simple work page (where I present my publications and link to teaching schedule), and RW was perfect for this: it was fast, and it’s easy to maintain.

The main weakness of RW for me was in blogging, and especially how to deal with comments. Haloscan works, and I’ve used it, but it’s not well enough integrated for my taste. This, and wanting to use MarsEdit made me switch the blog part of my site out of RW. One nice thing is that it’s very easy to mix and match this way: adding a link in the RW sidebar pointing to my blog, as if it was part of the RW site, was very simple. Now the styles don’t match, but I really don’t mind.

Finally, even though I’ve looked at the many plugins available out there, I’ve never felt the need to buy one. I guess my web site layout is too boring to need it So RW has just cost me the initial license cost and the upgrade to 3.6. And it seems the upgrade to version 4 (which will be Leopard only) is going to be free!