Filed under: Software, Cool tools, Graphic Design
Stacks plugin brings fluid layouts to RapidWeaver
If we've said it once, we've said it 1000 times: TUAW loves RapidWeaver. One of RapidWeaver's strengths is that it has an easy-to-use interface, but you can do some really, really powerful stuff with the program. Plus, the third-party network of plugins and themes is really, really top notch.YourHead Software, which makes some of my favorite RapidWeaver add-ons, has just released a new plugin called Stacks, which ups the ante on what you can do with RapidWeaver, without even having to mess with any code.
Think of Stacks as a souped-up version of one of YourHead's other plugins, Blocks. Mat reviewed Blocks a couple of years ago and it remains one of the best RapidWeaver plugins around. Stacks takes the WYSIWYG drag-and-drop layout approach of Blocks, but adds support for fluid layouts (even if your theme has a variable width), nested objects, stacks within stacks, and more.
I've been using the Stacks beta for the last couple of weeks and I have to say that it has opened my eyes to some possibilities with RapidWeaver that I hadn't even considered before. Traditionally, creating a different layout for each page is time consuming unless you rely on snippets or go with basic designs. Because I like to use RapidWeaver to rapidly prototype sites, being able to build out various layouts extremely quickly saves me time.
As a demonstration, I created this page in about five minutes using Stacks, some graphics and Elixir's Twitter plugin for Stacks. That's another feature I like about Stacks -- there's an API -- so not only can advantageous users look at building their own elements for use in Stacks, RapidWeaver plugin and theme developers can look at using it too. Stacks can also use Loghound's excellent PlusKit so that you can embed Google Docs, other page types or elements and do lightboxing with your photos, all within Stacks.
Stacks is $19.95 and it requires RapidWeaver 4.2.1 or newer to work. You can try the demo (direct link to DMG) for free and access all the features; you're just limited to a certain number of items on each page.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Tim said 7:14PM on 2-18-2009
Love Stacks. I use it and Elixir's Float theme on my site (same theme you use on your demo page linked about).
http://www.thinkingcoffee.com/
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cian said 8:35PM on 2-18-2009
I bought it as well, and quite like it. I have always found Yourhead to be ok the expensive side of things, I mean, most entire themes cost that or less, but all their plugins certainly are the highest of quality.
One thing I will mention is that although they keep talking about their forums where you can download extra blocks, it has been offline for a fair while. I think they should bring it val.
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bigdilvey said 10:30PM on 2-18-2009
If only they gave TUAW readers a discount code they could use on checkout. They have a nifty little box right at the end that you could put one in at checkout.
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mjbradford said 11:07AM on 2-19-2009
Just a question, how did you manage to get 3 columns in the 'My Writing' section of your demo page?
I can only get the demo to do multiples of 2, but I'd love to be able to make it more flexible.
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Christina Warren said 11:53AM on 2-19-2009
Oh - that's a really cool little feature -- you can drag a column into an existing column. So you create a column stack, and then in one of those resulting "stacks" (because you now have two), you can drag in a new column. Then, just adjust the width of the first set of columns so that the single is something like 33% of the width, and the column that is holding two areas is 66%.
kari said 3:22PM on 2-26-2009
Hi. I was wondering if you can advise on whether to buy blocks or stacks. Does stacks do everything that blocks does? I have been using the demos for both, but it seems that blocks does more?
Thanks!
Kari
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Christina Warren said 8:27PM on 2-26-2009
Blocks might be able to do more out of the box, but there are already a ton of free Stacks plugins to add functionality to Stacks (like the Twitter plugin I linked to) and it is really shaping up into what looks to be THE plugin to get for RapidWeaver (I would say Stacks plus Loghound's PlusKit, which will let you embed pages into other pages, import a Google doc into a page, etc.) and the RW design-community is really taken with it (and for good reason, it really opens up a lot of possibilities).
Drop by the RapidWeaver forums (realmacsoftware.com/forums I think) and see what they think -- the plugin and theme developers hang out there a lot and you can get a lot of really good info.
If it were me, I'd go for Stacks myself.