FormLoom could answer many dreams

RapidWeaver, as great as it is, has always had one or two week points. Fortunately, through the wonderful foresight of Realmac Software developers, they have a wonderful SDK and strongly encourage add-on development (plugins, themes and applications developed from beyond the walls of Realmac Software). Some add-ons add features and functions never imagined in-house, while others simply improve upon existing plugins and exceed expectations of the original.

And that is the case of FormLoom (announced here) which takes the idea of the built in RapidWeaver Form plugin and and puts it in a whole other universe. Now consider that the original RapidWeaver form plugin has been plagued with many issues over the years and has been missing certain many rudimentary features. It's the kind of plugin that requires a great deal of attention, with server side programming, keeping things un-hackable, striping tags, etc... With everything else that RMS has going on, this little plugin has probably been a sore in their side. FormLoom is just what was needed in my view. It does (or will do) everything that a form plugin ought to do with the technology that it should be doing it with. In short, the forms it generates are proper web apps.

I have yet to get my hands on a copy but I am most certain that I will be able to put this thing into some heavy rotation. Go check it out for yourself.

NEW THEME: Neato from Varsis Studio

Neato Designer, from Varsis Studio, is a simple but elegant RapidWeaver theme that is lightweight and easy to use. First offered from Varsis Studio, seyDesign has taken the original Neato theme and expanded and improved upon it. Complete cleaned up, overhauled and tuned in, Neato is ready and stable for your most demanding challenges.

Features at a glance:

• 10 Custom headers
• RWmultitool Ready
• 6 background textures
• Sidebar position
• Choice of font style
• Color control
• and more...

Learn more about Neato Designer

See the live preview

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THEME UPDATE: Simplistic R3 More Friendly With GoDaddy Hosting

Simplistic for RapidWeaver has been updated to address some issues with users hosting with GoDaddy. The structure of the comments within the HTML code were triggering specific GoDaddy server commands (a weak method on GoDaddy's part if you ask me) that caused sites made with Simplistic to crash on GoDaddy hosting. The comments have been amended to counter this ill effect.

For more details on the fixes visit the Simplistic update section or download the update directly here.

'sey'Design by Example, we're in print

There is no greater flattery than to be made an example of so when we were asked some time ago if we would consent to being published in DesignMeltdown's, The Web Designer's Idea Book, I was truly honored.

Today, I received my copy in the mail and was thrilled to find these kind words on page 102 along side a screen shot on page 103:

"A great example of a unified design is the seyDesign site. It has an office theme, and everything flows together perfectly. The corkboard background creates a terrific foundation to tie the site together. It essentially gives the office supplies a place to exist."

Of course this isn't how the site looks today, but for this 2007 iteration of seyDesign.com to be forever immortalized in print is a true sense of accomplishment. All in all, RapidWeaver developers as a whole had a good showing in this book with various sites. Adam from Elixir Graphics has already written about his contributions. and I've heard there are more, I just haven't had time to look through each page yet.

To get yourself a copy of this most excellent web design resource, go to Amazon.com.

THEME UPDATE: Acumen r3 fixes navigation shift

At risk of completely echoing everything I said about cataLog the other day, I have for you the Acumen update that addresses the same problem, the mysterious shifting second level navigation. It was only a few of you going through this, or at least only a few of you who recognized the trouble enough to bring it to my attention. The fix was similar to that of cataLog, though not exactly the same so we have had to put Acumen through it's own bit of testing, hence the delay of it's release.

Again, I won't bore you with the details here, as I have gone on about it at length here, and having now labored through this issue twice I can say that I have about had my fill of DOCTYPE differences. Acumen is now fixed like it's sibling, cataLog, and we have now issued the update to Acumen.

Again, we would like to apologize for any inconvenience this has caused the group of you who had this occur to them but we are confident that you can now put this behind you. We want to thank John Coyne and Marten Claridge for all your work in guiding us to the problem and diligently testing our fixes along the way.

For more details on the fixes visit the Acumen update section or download the update directly here.

THEME UPDATE: cataLog r3 fixes navigation shift

I have very good news for both cataLog and Acumen users, that we have found the cause of the mysterious shifting second level navigation that was plaguing a small handful of you (no, I no longer consider you crazy). After an exhaustive search we were finally able to trace the odd occurrence to a conflict or difference in interpretation between the Strict DOCTYPE and the Transitional DOCTYPE and their respective roles in rendering the inline-block property.

I won't bore you with the details here, as I have gone on about it at length here, but I will just say that we were relieved to finally be able to replicate the issue ourselves and find a resolution to the problem. We have fixed and are now releasing the update to cataLog and the update to Acumen should come out later this week.

We would like to apologize for any inconvenience this has caused the group of you who had this occur to them but we are confident that you can now put this behind you. We want to thank John Coyne and Marten Claridge for all your work in guiding us to the problem and diligently testing our fixes along the way.

For more details on the fixes visit the cataLog update section or download the update directly here.

THEME UPDATE: wideNas r3 fixes footer links

wideNas for RapidWeaver 4.0 has been updated to r3 to correct a small issue where links in the footer were not clickable. We have also tweaked or added a few other bits here and there such as Info.plist which allows end users to easily view the themes version from Finder. We have also added support for release notes which will allow both developers and end users to keep track of the changes made to the theme over time. This will better allow us to track what version the user is using and help us deliver the best support possible.

For a complete list of the changes, go to the wideNas updates section or download the update directly.

We're back and ready to roll.

We are back from or little vacay, and back on the horse, if you will, working through a pile of emails and such. On our agenda this week is to address a few bug issues in some of our RapidWeaver themes, namely a footer issue in wideNas, and a couple of mystery bugs that occasionally rear their head in cataLog and Acumen. We should have all of these addressed this week with their respective update installers ready for download.

And as always we are ever moving forward and onward with the theme developments and ideas. We have quite a list of them to get through over the next year or so so you can be sure to see one or two new themes from us every month. Yes that is an ambitious plan, but this is what we do after all, we might very well be the only full time RapidWeaver theme developers now who do nothing else.

And speaking of RapidWeaver, did you notice that RapidWeaver 4.2 has been released? Yes indeed. I have not yet tried it myself, but I have downloaded it and will be getting into it shortly. Learn more about it's release here.