I’ve used Rapidweaver for 10+ years for developing websites. Nothing fancy or high tech, mostly helping non-profits get on the web. I purchased a licence for Blocs when it first came out but it wasn’t really prime time then.
However, Blocs is moving at a great pace as opposed to Rapidweaver’s rather stagnated development. Rapidweaver is really driven by the stacks developers rather than Realmac. Without a framework from stacks developers Rapidweaver is rather lacklustre. My one niggle is that I have tons of stacks purchased over the years which is a lot of investment, and my worklfow is fairly simple.
Blocs is now debuting Blocs on iOS, which opens up the world of editing websites with the iPad on the move, which would be helpful to me.
Is it time to shift to Blocs?
I would be interested in anyone who has made that transition or who has decided against it.
There’s a 3rd option: wait for the new Stacks 5 app which will come out. The Stacks plugin developer has moved away from RW and developing his own app. It will work with all the stacks you already have. Likely arrival: Jan 2023 (but obviously just a guess).
… we’ll see what happens but my guess right now is Stacks 5 will be a wonderful product.
Although that looks like a promising direction, Blocs being available on desktop and iOS is a big selling point for me and solves and age old restriction.
I played around with Rapidweaver 15 years ago. Used it for a year or two as an experiment on a personal site. Up to that point I’d always coded the html so the Rapidweaver template method never felt right. I feel the same about Wordpress today. But Blocs looks very nice. Looks like they already have a Mac app and I see in their forums they have a beta for iPad. Guessing that’s what you’re referring to. Do you use the Blocs app for Mac? I might try the trial.
I do have it and I have used it. I like its ability to show you the code and working with css. You feel more in control. The trade off is that stacks provides so much more functionality although the bricks in Blocs do that also.
Yes, if iOS is something you really need (for whatever reasons) then Blocs is the way to go with the current choices you presented. For the sites I create (course websites) there are some essential stacks I use with Rapidweaver/Stacks that are not available with Blocs. So functionality trumps iOS for me. But I understand your design needs are likely different.
… and I have to admit I find iOS too limiting in way too many areas. Great for Netflix, and great for a few other things, but I never use it for “real” work. But for someone like you who does seem to use iOS a lot for work the attractiveness of Blocs is understandable.
The iOS angle is more that there are often times when I need to update websites and I am away from my main machine. They are often small edits that the iPad could easily do. Having to wait until I get back to my main machine can become a bottleneck.
Got it! Please update us on your Blocs Mac and iOS experiences. I’d be interested to hear about them. I bought Blocs 3 years ago but didn’t end up using it much. It has evolved since then and it might be a nice tool to use for some non-course websites I develop. At any rate it would definitely be interesting to learn about your impressions.
How clean/light is the code output from Blocs? One thing I really like about coding by hand is that I can easily understand what I’m looking at and the files are pretty lightweight.
Not sure about blocs, hopefully someone will comment. For Rapidweaver(RW) I asked the question last year here:
For RW and Blocs a lot of functionality comes through RW stacks and Blocs bricks (although with Blocs I believe you can also see the code). These are essentially plugins that provide extra functionality when creating your site, they are plug and play. For example they can allow you to easily add social icons or media players or parallax views. These all have to be purchased separately or in a framework (essentially a group of the plugins; this is by far the best route in RW.)
The difficulty is that the code behind the plugin is developer dependent. It can also add more code to your website if plugin developers are using the same open source code and you might get some occasional quirks where different plugins don’t work well together (although that’s very occasional).
With RW; where I have my main experience; the stacks management is not the best. There is an integrated update feature, but nothing to tell you if your stack contains deprecated code or if the developer has ceased updating. Over the years I’ve accumulated such a cruft of stacks with no real way of knowing which are still supported. You also need to know which stacks your site depends on to work (so you don’t delete it) and if you maintain a number of sites that may well be a whole lot of info to keep track of. I’ve currently chosen the framework route with RW as frameworks are easy to keep updated although they are also more expensive.
I’m re-looking at my use of RW as development does not appear to be progressing. Also, with advances in HTML 5 and CSS 3, there’s also a lot of functionality that can be leveraged just knowing HTML & CSS well, maybe even enough for a simple basic website, which is where I prefer Blocs as you can see your code. Many of the sites I create are static and informational.
Just a heads up that Rapidweaver is now a subscription model only, with fairly large price hikes.
In the last couple of months they’ve killed off any loyalty longstanding customers might have had. I would no longer recommend this app although I have used it for over a decade. Sad how poor management forces you to change your tools.