RapidWeaver has always been an excellent choice for those that are privacy-conscious, but we’ve gone even further with RapidWeaver Classic. All built-in themes use local resources, and this means none of them makes requests to third-party servers, you seriously can't get better than that.

You can find adjust the Privacy settings for your website under the "Privacy" section in your project file.

If you are using Google Analytics you might include a message like this:

This website uses cookies that help the website to function and also to track how you interact with our website.

The preview system in RapidWeaver gives you the ability to reliably preview all PHP inside RapidWeaver, and some magical ways to work with RapidWeaver and your favourite browser.

To preview your project in RapidWeaver press command-r or the "eye" button in the main toolbar.

Here’s how to preview your website inside the Browser:

1. Open a project file, and stay in Edit mode.

2. Use Cmd + P to preview your website in your default browser.

3. Go back to RapidWeaver, and make any changes in Edit mode.

4. Return to the browser, and see the changes reflected.

The live preview in Safari, Chrome, Firefox, etc also allows you to navigate around your RapidWeaver project. Simply follow your site navigation while in the Browser and RapidWeaver will switch pages in the background, making it easier than ever to make changes.

Adding a site badge is a new feature in RapidWeaver Classic, it allows you to display a badge in the corner of your website. This feature is great to show your support for a cause or draw attention to a sale or product. While the feature may seem limited at first, the scope of things you can use it for is huge.

By Default, RapidWeaver will show a "Built with RapidWeaver" badge on all new projects. If your copy of RapidWeaver is registered you can turn it off or change the way it looks in the "Settings" area under "General".

Some of the basic settings are built into RapidWeaver, making it easy to customise:

• Icon (e.g. rapidweaver-icon.png)

• Title (e.g. Made With RapidWeaver)

• URL (e.g. https://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver)

• Position (i.e. you can pick a corner)

• Animation (i.e. how the badge appears)

• Delay (i.e. when the badge appears, either time or scroll distance-based)

The badge support light and dark mode and will switch background and text colour depending on the system settings.

However, you can go further by customising the way it looks with a little bit of CSS.

Badge CSS Options

The Badge supports the following CSS properties. They are listed out below along with some examples of customization.

--rw-badge-dark-background
--rw-badge-dark-color

--rw-badge-background
--rw-badge-color

--rw-badge-position-offset
--rw-badge-transition-duration
--rw-badge-font-family
--rw-badge-padding
--rw-badge-font-size
--rw-badge-border-radius
--rw-badge-box-shadow
--rw-badge-display
--rw-badge-align-items
--rw-badge-text-transform
--rw-badge-text-dectoration
--rw-badge-gap
--rw-badge-font-weight
--rw-badge-image-width
--rw-badge-image-height

How to customize the badge with CSS

You can customise the look of the badge with CSS, either per page or site-wide by writing code in the CSS Code areas.

Use the rapidweaver-badge CSS selector to make changes.

rapidweaver-badge {

}

Example CSS

To hide the badge on a certain page you can use the following CSS in the page "CSS" area.

rapidweaver-badge {
 visibility: hidden;
}

The following example, makes the background of the badge red, and the text semi transparent.

rapidweaver-badge {
  --rw-badge-background: red;
  --rw-badge-color: rgba(0,0,0,0.5);
}

This example displays a larger icon, and puts a linear gradient in the background.

rapidweaver-badge {
      --rw-badge-color: white;
      --rw-badge-background: linear-gradient(to right, red, purple);
      --rw-badge-dark-background: linear-gradient(to right, orange, green);
      --rw-badge-padding: 1rem 3rem;
      --rw-badge-font-size: 2rem;
      --rw-badge-image-width: 64px;
      --rw-badge-image-height: 64px;
      --rw-badge-position-offset: 50px;
}

There are a few options when it comes to backing up your project, the first method we'd recommend is to publish a copy alongside your website. This can be done automatically inside of RapidWeaver.

Automatic Backup when publishing

When RapidWeaver publishes your website, an optional backup of the RapidWeaver project file can be uploaded at the same time. The project file is compressed as a ZIP file, and is placed in a secret folder on your website, meaning that if you know the address it can be downloaded and re-used.

You can enable backups to happen every time you publish, or on a less regular schedule. Backups only occur when your site is published, and do not happen in the background.

Project backup will increase the amount of time taken to publish your website. RapidWeaver cannot use multiple concurrent connections to upload a backup, as concurrent connections can only be used to upload different files.

Manually Backing up your Projects

You should always make copies or backups of your RapidWeaver Project file as this is the master file for your entire website. It's super important. You don't want it stolen or accidentally deleted! You have a few options to keep your site safe. First of all, we'd recommend backing up with Time Machine. This is built into macOS, and you just need an external drive to backup too. As well as using TimeMachine to back up your Mac on-site. We'd recommend using a cloud backup service alongside it. Our preferred solution is Arq, it's easy and cheap to set up.

The code that RapidWeaver generates is designed to help your site load as quickly as possible, and wherever possible the app will look to optimise your site. To help optimise your site, Health Check will analyse your project settings and let you know about enhancements you can make to your site.

Project Checks

RapidWeaver will run the following checks on your project to see if the features are being used, or need tweaking.

• If your site is using the new banner image feature, and an alternate label has not been specified, you’ll be prompted to add one.

• If you’ve chosen to add a logo to your project file, but have not set an alternate label, Health Check will warn you about this.

• CSS Consolidation helps to keep your sites loading quickly. It’s recommended for all sites and enabled by default on new projects.

• Tidied URLs help your sites be better discovered by search engines.

• Minification helps compress your CSS and JavaScript. It’s enabled by default for new projects.

• Missing Favicon & WebClip icons ensure your website’s identity is shown in the browser.

• XML Sitemaps help search engines know about the pages in your project. RapidWeaver can generate one automatically, and submit it on your behalf.

• Keep up to date with the latest versions of your plugins. Health Check will let you know if there are plugin updates available.

Page Checks

• It’s important to give your pages a descriptive title - not only does this appear in the name of the tab of your browser, but it’s also used by search engines as your web page’s name in search results. Health Check will flag any missing, or overly-long Browser Titles.

• Giving your web pages descriptive URLs can help people find content on your site. If you’ve got folder names such as “page58”, RapidWeaver will flag this to be fixed.

• Description Metatags are a useful addition to your pages and are normally shown as the blurb beneath a web page’s name in search results. Health Check will check whether a description metatag has been entered in the Page Inspector’s SEO tab. Any hand-coded HTML will not be analysed.

• Giving your images descriptive file names can help search engines index your page. Health Check will highlight any images with generic filenames.

• In addition to descriptive filenames, you can improve the accessibility of your website by using the Alt attribute to describe the image’s content. This will be used by screen-readers, or when a visitor chooses not to show images on web pages.

• RapidWeaver will analyse links that point to pages that no longer exist inside your project. Health Check will not check links entered by hand - only those selected via the Add Link sheet’s popup menu.

This feature is often overlooked but contains a lot of hidden power. IT's a fast and easy way to see how your website will look on different devices.

Getting Started

To open a preview of your site with the Simulator, click the "Simulate" toolbar item.

Here's a preview of the Simulator showing how the Realmac Software site would look on an iPhone X. You can change the size using the drop menu in the middle of the window.

Multiple Simulator Windows

...

Saving Simulator Layouts

Macros in RapidWeaver were initially implemented to help with theme development, however, some of them can be useful when used in the pages you create inside RapidWeaver. Let's get started by taking a look at an example that uses the Site Title macro.

Macro Example

Macros are tags that can be used within RapidWeaver pages to pull in content or details about your website. Macros tags also start and end with the % character.

For example, if you place "%site_title% within a text area on a page, the syntax would be replaced with the site title you specified in the Site Settings area.

Input: Welcome to %site_title%, I hope you like it.

Would then be turned into:

Output: Welcome to My Website, I hope you like it.

Why use a macro tag? If you used %site_title% throughout your site, you'd only have to update it in one place (Site Settings) to change the name of your website. Instead of having to manually change the instance on every page within your site.

Macro Syntax

RapidWeaver Classic support the following Macros:

%title% - Outputs the title of the current page.

%site_title% - Outputs the site title from the site setup.

%site_slogan% - Outputs the site slogan from the site setup.

%logo% - Outputs the logo from site setup, including required html. e.g.

<img src="rw_common/images/my_logo.jpg" width="350" height="100" alt="My Website">

%footer% - Outputs the contents of the footer from the site setup.

%email% - Outputs the email address from the site setup.

%website_address% - Outputs the website address as specified in the site setup.

%sidebar_title% - Outputs the sidebar title.

%sidebar% - Outputs the sidebar content.

%base_url% - Outputs the base URL of the website.

%resource(image.png)% - Outputs a link to the name resource.

%last_published% - Outputs the last published date as dd/mm/yyyy

%ogTitle% - Outputs the Open Graph Title (under Social Tags)

%ogDescription% - Outputs the Open Graph Description (under Social Tags)

%ogImage% - Outputs the url of the Open Graph Image (under Social Tags) e.g.

/resources/my-social-image.png

Resources Macro Example

The resources macro is one of the most useful macros. If you need to embed an image or have use for an image’s address, instead of hardcoding the link you can use a resource macro.

Whenever a resource macro is found in your project, RapidWeaver will substitute it for a link to the resource. Here's an example of the syntax:

%resource(image.jpg)%

The above macro would become a path to a resource called image.jpg. If the resource is inside a folder, be sure to include the name of the folder in your macro, like this:

%resource(folder-name/image.jpg)%

You can get a resources macro by right-clicking on an image or file in the Resources Browser and choosing "Copy Macro", a super handy, yet little known feature.

You can then paste the "macro" into any area when you want to link to that resource.

RapidWeaver includes over fifty varying templates known as “themes”, including a number of modern responsive designs that you can use.

With a page now added to your project, choose Preview on the main toolbar to get your bearings (you can also toggle Preview mode with the keyboard shortcut Cmd-R). By default, RapidWeaver will apply the “Offroad” theme to your site to preview your content. We’re going to browse the available themes by toggling the Themes option on the main toolbar.

The Theme Browser allows you to apply any theme with a single click - you can customise each theme further once it’s selected. The Theme Browser allows you to search, select a specific folder (for example, to only show the more modern themes), and duplicate the themes to make modifications.

Once you’ve selected a theme, choose Master Styles in the Page List.

The Master Styles area contains the variations available as part of your selected theme, and allows you to customise the theme across your entire site. Master Styles is the best way to lay your entire site out, but if you need to customise the layout of a single page don’t worry - you can override your site-wide Master Styles on a per-page basis if you need to!

Adding Resources

This section will cover how to add resources to the Resources Manager for use in your project.

Add File

Add a file to the resources browser for use in a project.

Add Folder

Creates a new folder inside of your Resources.

Add Remote Resource

The "Add Remote Resource" feature will download the resource and save it locally into the project.

When you add that resource to a project it does not link to the version online, it will use the local version of it.

When you upload your project it will upload that image resource to your server.