Sticking with RapidWeaver. For now....

With the recent news of Karelia releasing version 1.5.2 of Sandvox, I suddenly found myself comparing it versus what I’m currently using. I’ve done this dance before – when I initially bought my current software – but lately I’ve been running into frustrations that I was fully aware of, and others that I wasn’t even aware they existed before I saw how Sandvox handled them. I’ve been toying around now for like two weeks trying to decide what to do about it/them, and I was pretty close at one point to saying “hell with it” and just either buying it, or not doing a website at all (oddly different ends of the spectrum, I know).

Wanting to switch website creation engines was really about trying to simplify the process; the easier I can make it, the better for me. Of course this has to be balanced with my desire to do things my way; after all, if it was just about ease-of-use and nothing more, I’d have not ever spent a dime and just gone on blogger or something. Or not done a damn thing in the first place.

I mean, I guess what I wanted out of my website was basically myspace, but without all that crappy myspace messing it up, you know? I want my pictures, my movies, my blog, my this & that. But more than just wanting that stuff, I want it to be the way I want it it be. I’m picky like that; sue me.

RapidWeaver has its shortcomings; managing sidebar content is NOT as easy as I feel it should be. What I want I feel is simple enough, but it requires hacks or third-party add-ons to accomplish, and even then only gets close, it doesn’t actually do it: I want my sidebar content to be synced across parent/child pages. So that – for instance – the sidebar you see on my bios main page is the same as the sidebar you see on the bios child pages (me, Betty, Miles, Zoey). And if I make a change – either adding something, deleting, or modifying – that change is automatically reflected on each page, without me having to change it on each one, individually.

Only like 5 pages anyway, right? What’s the big deal? Well Chase & Hunter will eventually get their own pages too, provided they manage to stay alive to their 2-year birthday. So that’s 7. Then there’s the photo pages. See as it stands, there’s already some 20-odd pages, and it will only grow with time. So that means, if I want my sidebar content to be the same across all pages, right now I have to do it manually across all of them. And what’s more, even if I did hack something together to sync them, it’d only suffice for changes. Anything added or deleted would require I go back and do that manually.

Sandvox is nicer in this regard, though still not perfect. As it stands, at least it can sync content across parent/child pages, or even site-wide. See how it works is, you add a “pagelet,” which is a little piece of something that sticks around on the sidebar. It contains most anything, from a link list, to your amazon list, to HTML code you put in to do fantastic things (such as display porn. Just saying). You put these “pagelets” on a parent page (a page with underlings; in the above example, it would be the Bios Home page), and you select to have it inherited by all the children pages. Now, any changes you make to it – or simply the process of adding it – sync to all the pages underneath it as well.

But what it’s missing is finer-grain control. If I create a certain number of pagelets on the parent page, the children pages cannot have a different order. This is mostly fine, except for the pagelets you specify site-wide. These take precedence over everything, so if you have 3 or 4 created from the master template, but say on the Blog page you want your archives for the Blog at the very top or very bottom (duh), you can’t really do that because the site-wide ones will not allow a pagelet specified on a page “below it,” to be moved above it (or below if you specified to have it on the bottom). So you’re limited in the order you can actually work with on particular pages.

RapidWeaver allows more control of course (to the point of not allowing any cool syncing features al all! *groan*). It’s a pain in the ass to have to set up the pages manually, but it can be largely short-cut with some ingenuity and the use of plugins like pluskit & blocks, or @stash. There’s no getting around the addition & subtraction of page elements so far as I can see, however. There are still some niceties that RapidWeaver has over Sandvox, too. That finer-grain control. Just on the blogs, for instance… Sandvox has no way to create tags or categories. Tags like “New Family Members,” as I currently have. Or “Personal” or “Politics & Policy,” my personal fave… And the work that would go into trying to duplicate that functionality… well let’s just say that I ain’t doing it. Period. Either it’s built-in, or it’s not happening, folks.

Then there’s what I can do on any particular page. Say I want to add a video to this page. I just drop it in. It’s not as pretty to get done, but hey, a line of code later, and BOOM! A youtube video of a hot girl doing a hot dance (ga ga ga… ;-) ):

You see, what I wanted to do was make it as easy to create/lay out as it is to look at. Right now it’s not as easy to create as it is to look at, but at least I have some freedom to do it like I want, even if it is more work up front. The more I investigated Sandvox recently, the more it became apparent that it was NOT what I wanted to do; more than anything, I simply wanted to borrow some of the functionality and add it to MY toolset. Alas, as of this writing, I cannot.

RapidWeaver, you still get the nod. By a nose hair, you damned woolly beast; by a nose hair.