Central Dispatch May 2010

06/05/10 08:46 Filed in: Dispatch

Welcome, Weaverling

For those of you arriving blistered and bewildered from the galactic backwaters of sanity far beyond RapidWeaver Central's Reality Distortion Field, this is the parallel dimension in which we bring together everything that's been happening — and is about to happen — in the RapidWeaver community.

And as many of our regular interstellar commuters are aware, this is also where we collate all the weaverlicious articles, links and resources we've stumbled across in the last four weeks, and load them aboard our interstellar Resource Train.

Unfortunately, because of the global disruption caused by Eyjafjallajökull's volcanic eruption, April's been a bit of a slow month on the RapidWeaver news front. So intrepid Weaver newshounds that we are, we ignored international aviation edicts and flew our resourceful news team north to Reykjavic in order to see for ourselves if there were any RapidWeavers building websites in the lee of the volcano. There weren't.

But we did find a bar in Reykjavic that stayed open till dawn. And it was there in the early hours of the morning that we first heard the intriguing rumours concerning El Stacko's next stack and the seismic rifts emanating from deep beneath the tectonic plates that form the Mid Atlantic Ridge. But more on that later. First we've got giveaways to give away.

Giving It All Away

This month we have four items to give away. John Malinowski has kindly offered up both a RapidBook Block and a RapidTicker Block, while next month we'll be giving away the Stacks version of both. Also in this month's giveaway is a licence for COSCulture's versatile TabMate, plus a copy of Andy Johnstone's latest theme Decorate. As always, if you'd like to be in with a chance of winning one of these prizes then tell us which giveaway you'd like to win and consign your fate or fortune to the whim of your gods or failing that, our random number generator. [The competition is now CLOSED. Thanks to all who entered, and if you didn't win this time, try again next month when we'll have plenty more giveaways to give away...]

Vasily's RW Reviews

Unless you've been buried under volcanic ash these last few weeks then you'll probably have witnessed the birth of Vasily Ingogly's latest resource for the RapidWeaver community.

Inspired by the number of folks expressing dissatisfaction with products purchased over the past few years, and the frequent call for a way to find themes by characteristics, Vasily says RW Reviews is intended to provide a sort of “Consumer Reports” capability for the RW community. Already you can find a growing number of reviews of RapidWeaver add-ons — such as themes, plugins, stacks, and snippets— with star ratings, guided search for add-ons by various criteria, sortable lists of search results and category tables, and the much requested search capability for themes by criteria: columns, editable headers, etc.

Like Vasily's Rapidanswers website, RW Reviews is a free resource where anyone can register for an account; an account is needed to post reviews.

The Link Inspector Calls

Eric Boo has released a very useful plugin that has already become one of my favourites. With a site the size of RapidWeaver Central, and the amount of external links we employ to our thousands of resources, I'm sure you can imagine how difficult it would be to regularly check the vailidity of our ever expanding library of URLs. Enter COSCulture's Link Inspector, a new Rapidweaver plugin that lets you check your published Rapidweaver sites for broken or unreachable anchor links. It functions by checking each web page for links and then checking if those links are valid. If the links reside on your site, they will also be checked for more links, until no more new links are found. Once Link Inspector has completed its job, you can then tell which links are broken and proceed to fix them.

And while you're there, why not check out CosCulture's Plugins and Stacks Bundles, each of which offers a 15% discount on the price of the individual products combined.

Thinking outside the BlocksBox

And on the subject of innovation, here's Inkarma's Mario thinking outside the box. This time it's the BlocksBox. In the same manner that Jonas extended the use of Blocks with his BlocksBox theme, Mario now extends the use of both with some great ready-made themes. These themes are ideal for RapidWeavers taking their first steps with Blocks and BlocksBox. Saved as Sandwich files (.rwsw), it's as easy as opening them in order to start editing the contents.

Ever thought of using the RW Photo Album as a Flash Banner? Well, here's how. With prices ranging between €5 and €9, these themes provide a great way to mix and match styles as well as learn how to make the most of Blocks and BlocksBox. You can check out the Inkarma website here — where you'll also find many more resources, including the RW Manual in German — and you can view a few of the theme previews below:

The Master of Composition

Will Woodgate's busy working on his forthcoming Pendulum and Shoplifter themes which we hope to feature here exclusively in next month's edition of the newsletter. Meanwhile he's revamped the Themeflood website, released an update for Composition — details of which can be found here — and, he reminds me, the promo codes supplied with the theme are valid until Friday 7th May.

Also updated recently was Media 1.3, which addressed a few minor bugs and added a couple of excellent new features :

- Updated jQuery to 1.4 minified
- Fixed a bug where some animated third-party Stacks could overflow outside the content container
- Fixed a bug where a margin could be rendered on both sides of the content container
- Fixed a bug where a footer link could not be clicked if the breadcrumb links were off
- Fixed a bug where FormLoom elements were not properly aligned in IE7 / IE8
- CSS reset modified to improve italicised text formatting
- Individual navigation links now have class selectors applied dynamically*
- Ability to disable navigation links, but keep them displayed in the menu**
- New drop down menu code with improved responsiveness and browser compatibility
- Menu now degrades safely in non-Javascript enabled web browsers
- New drop-down menu width settings
- Replace standard breadcrumb links with parent page links
- Indicator arrows within the menu are now fully customisable using RW MultiTool
- Improved print.css stylesheet
- User guide reorganised and updated with additional information
- New code snippets available
- More variable theme width settings added
- 5 new example header background images included
- Customisable navigation bar background

*What this means is that every link has a class selector applied to it dynamically, e.g. link16. You can apply custom css to these individual links. As an example, you could have some links set with a different text colour to highlight something special or apply icons next to different links. Groups of links (unordered lists) also have unique selectors applied, so you can apply different styles to different drop-down menu's.

**When building a drop-down navigation menu in a website, it is often normal for the uppermost (parent) page to act like a link (to fire a drop down menu for example) but not actually link to a page themselves. It has not been possible to easily deactivate links in RapidWeaver before, and this is something which has been raised in these forums on many occasions. I have now devised a method to disable links, but keep them displayed in the menu. The method is safe to use across all web browsers, does not require javascript, retains valid strict XHTML status and is easy to setup in the Media theme. See the demo version of Media to see this new feature in use. Details of setup are in the user guide.

World Premiere

Behind the mysterious shroud of enigmatic mystification it would appear that weaverPix is preparing to draw the curtain on a major premiere. Chief Boffin Greg Barchard informs us that RapidWeavers can now gain exclusive access to the world premiere by signing up for his newsletter where they'll receive all the juicy details plus an exclusive first look at the feature-packed weaverPix beta!

Other News

Gilberto tells me that Omnidea have completely redesigned their support system to make it even more efficient... and that they're also working on the forthcoming RapidCart 2.6, which will add #1 requested feature: iDEAL payment gateway support.

Also newsworthy is Josh Lockhart's latest forward-looking theme Archetype, which uses HTML5, CSS3, and jQuery, and works well in IE7, IE8, IE9, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. He's also just released updates to Flex and Satin so they now support ExtraContent and the latest versions of jQuery and PrettyPhoto.

For The Ladies

Meet the hunk who drives the Intergalactic Resource Train. It takes a special kind of man to shuttle our steam-powered Resource Train between wormholes. Fireboxes need constant stoking. And sometimes he gets lonely out there in the vast emptiness of hyperspace. So why not drop him a line and let him know you appreciate all his effort...

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