Two new screencasts have been released to
RapidWeaver Classroom subscribers today. The
first covers the symTune Image Slider
plugin from SymfoniP, which replicates
the look and feel of the image slider in the
iTunes Music Store. It’s provides a great
way of featuring content on your website,
and offers a really slick presentation of
images.
The second tutorial release is located under the
“How to...” lesson in Section 301, and it
walks-through the process of splitting a
RapidWeaver website into multiple project files.
This is great to understand when building large,
or media-intensive websites.
These tutorials are now available to RapidWeaver
Classroom subscribers. Not a subscriber? Register now or
learn more about
RapidWeaver Classroom!
A new tutorial covering the Speech Bubbles Stack from
Joe Workman is now available to RapidWeaver
Classroom subscribers. This is a pretty
awesome stack that creates speech bubbles
with rounded corners for your content. It’s
very easy to use and accomplishes something
that was once more complex to achieve -- I
know from personal experience, having added
speech bubbles to RapidWeaver Classroom, and
trust me when I say that it wasn’t nearly
this easy! Thanks to Joe for another great
stack, and I’m sure most of us can find good
use for it in our projects.
Two new tutorials are now available that cover
the Doo-Daily and Doo-Spin stacks from DooBox. Both of these
stacks allow you to add dynamic content to
your pages, either by having different
content load randomly with each visit, or by
having content set to appear depending on
the day of the week. These new tutorials are
available now to RapidWeaver Classroom
subscribers.
A new tutorial is now available covering the
symMedia5 plugin from SymfoniP. This is an
outstanding plugin that allows you to add
both video and audio files to a single page,
and have them play in a single player, with
a nice scroll bar to navigate through and
play the added media. In addition, this
plugin supports HTML5 video playback, and if
you aren’t familiar with the significance of
HTML5 video then you will learn a bit about
that as well in this tutorial.
This is the first tutorial on a plugin from
SymfoniP here at RapidWeaver Classroom, though
there is a FlowBox Stack tutorial available.
SymfoniP has been producing some great
RapidWeaver plugins for mixed media (photo,
audio, and video) -- so they all will be covered
in the coming weeks.
The 4th tutorial in our CMS series is now
available online to RapidWeaver Classroom
subscribers. This CMS solution involves Pulse CMS, which is the
first full-blown Content Management System
to be covered. I have chosen to start with
Pulse CMS because you host it on your own
server alongside your website, which is a
great advantage because all of your content
exists on one server, opposed to some of it
existing on another server that you have no
control over.
In advance of viewing this Pulse CMS tutorial, I
recommend viewing the “Working With an FTP
Application” lesson, which can be found under
Section 301 of the tutorials. This lesson will
get you comfortable with publishing files to your
server via FTP, which is required to install
Pulse.
More CMS solutions will be covered in the weeks
to come, alongside a variety of custom stacks and
even a few new RapidWeaver plugins.
I am happy to announce the release of a new
tutorial series called “Choosing a RapidWeaver
Theme.” This series is comprised of 5 screencasts
that total about 45 minutes -- discussing how to
find themes, along with tips and strategies to
use when looking for the best theme for your
project. With the release of this series I have
re-organized the curriculum listing a
bit, placing these tutorials just below the
lessons for RapidWeaver, along with the
ExtraContent and BlocksBox tutorials, since
these are all theme-related screencasts.
Subscribers to RapidWeaver Classroom can now view
this new series. Additionally, several more
screencasts have already been produced on another
topic, so another new release is coming very,
very soon!
I am happy to announce the launch of a new series
of tutorials on Content Management Systems! As
mentioned in my previous blog entry, I have been
researching different CMS solutions and I have
now begun to produce screencasts on the subject.
The launch of this series begins with 3 video
tutorials, which are now available to RapidWeaver
Classroom subscribers. More tutorials will be
released in the coming weeks, with the goal of
providing the most comprehensive coverage of
options available to RapidWeaver users.
Once again, if you have any experience using a
CMS with RapidWeaver, please comment here and let
me know your thoughts. I have developed a list of
solutions (see
previous blog entry), but am open to
other options and I am interested in
personal experience with any of them.
Not a RapidWeaver Classroom subscriber? Register now for
access to these, and 170+ other RapidWeaver
video tutorials!
I am currently researching and learning various
Content Management Systems and why they may or
may not be good solutions for use with
RapidWeaver. Allowing for user-editable content
outside of RapidWeaver has always been difficult
to solve, as RapidWeaver wasn’t created with that
feature. Various plugin-ins and stacks have been
released over time that address this issue, but
how you know which one to choose and how to use
it? This is a deep topic and one that I have
wanted to address for a long time, and I think
we’re at the point now where enough solid options
are available to where I can make recommendations
and explore all of the available options to some
degree.
My research and testing will result in a new
series that covers different types of content
management -- not exclusively limited to online
CMS systems. Video tutorials will be produced
over the next weeks, culminating in a
comprehensive resource. Here is a list of what I
have been working with so far:
Google Docs and PlusKit
RapidBlog
CushyCMS
SurrealCMS
WebYep
Pulse
PageLime
Unify
Dynamic Content Stacks from Blueball
Design
CMS/CSS Stacks from Joe Workman
If you have experience with any of these, or
with something else altogether, please comment on
this post and I might contact you personally for
more information. As I mentioned, this is a deep
subject and everyone can benefit more from
feedback based on your own experiences.
Last week saw the introduction of the new Lime
Theme from Elixir Graphics and the
Gyro Stack from Joe Workman. Adam and Joe
asked me to create a walk-through screencast
to demonstrate the new theme and stack, and
you can find that video below. Both are
outstanding products, as Lime has amazing
design and offers 3 ExtraContent areas, and
the Gyro Stack executes a fantastic feature
for your website -- you’ll have to check-out
the video below to see it in action.
I will give Gyro the full RapidWeaver Classroom
treatment with a dedicated tutorial in the near
future, so be on the lookout for that. My thanks
to Adam and Joe for including me in the release
of these great RapidWeaver add-ons!
I have published the 6th screencast to the
Complete Design Demonstration series -- this
tutorial demonstrates how the Learn More page was
created. The most unique part to this page
is the use of a free Table Stack created by
Phil Warrender.
There are still a couple of screencasts left to
go in this series, and I am working on quite a
few new tutorials for custom stacks as well, so
check back soon for more!
A 5th tutorial has been added to the Complete
Design Demonstration series. This video
demonstrates the creation of some features of the
members' page. Specifically:
Adding 5 columns of images and text to an
ExtraContent area
creating anchors
linking text to video that displays in a
Lightbox
This tutorial demonstrates the use of
snippets for ExtraContent and the Lightbox stacks
from Joe Workman. It is a lengthy 18-minute video
with a lot of information packed-in! Look for
more tutorials in this series to appear next
week.
I am very excited to begin offering a new series
that incorporates much of what is taught here at
RapidWeaver Classroom. The Complete Design
Demonstration series takes you through the
process of designing a website from start to
finish, using many of the different 3rd-party
plugins and theme features such as ExtraContent.
In this first C.D.D. series, you will see how
many of the pages here at RapidWeaver Classroom
were developed, using 3rd-party plugins such as
Stacks, PlusKit, Carousel, Accordion, and
EasyTube Gallery.
This series is best viewed after you have made
your way through all of the RapidWeaver and
3rd-party plugin tutorials, so that you are
familiar with the interface of the different
plugins. The purpose of this series is to
demonstrate the usage of plugins and other
features in a real-world scenario, and to
break-down designs that are seemingly complex
into something much more simple.
I have published the first 4 videos (45 minutes)
of this series to start, and more screencasts
will be added in the coming weeks as I
demonstrate how to build a majority of the pages
found here at RapidWeaver Classroom. You may also
notice that I titled the series with a number 1,
as my intention is to create multiple series over
time that demonstrate the usage of different
plugins and strategies.
I hope you enjoy this new series and find it
helpful as you explore how different plugins can
be used in your own projects. There will be more
to come soon!
2 new tutorials on Joe Workman Stacks have
been released today. Tutorials on the
MovingBox Stack and Link & Anchor Stacks
are now available. Joe has been generous
enough to offer the Link & Anchor Stacks
for free, so visit his website to download
the stacks and view his other incredible
offerings.
I am happy to announce the release of 3 new
tutorials on Joe Workman Stacks. Joe
Workman has been developing for the Stacks
plugin for some time now, and a couple of
months ago I produced a tutorial on 13
Video Stacks that were developed by Joe.
Today’s release adds 3 more stacks to the
curriculum, and I
have separated Joe’s stacks into their own
section, whereas before all custom stacks
tutorials were located under the Stacks
plugin listing.
The following tutorials are now available:
Lightbox Stack - Easily add a
Lightbox effect that displays any type of
content.
Translate Stack - Allows visitors to
read your website in any language.
Curtain Call Stack - Provide your
visitors with a unique presentation of content --
especially great for video or special promotions.
Of course you can expect to see coverage of many
more Joe Workman Stacks in the future!
A new video tutorial covering the FlowBox Stack has been
released to subscribers of RapidWeaver
Classroom. This is an outstanding stack that
provides a lightbox-type overlay for
displaying video, images, and even other
webpages. It is quite flexible and so the
18-minute video goes into detail of all the
different ways content can be presented
inside the FlowBox.
This is the first screencast on a SymfoniP stack, and you
can bet that there will be more to come!
I recently published a new video tutorial on the
FaqMaker plugin from
Loghound. This plugin has
actually been around for quite a while, but
I have recently rediscovered it myself and
made it a part of my toolset. FaqMaker
provides some great flexibility in creating
a highly functional -- and even creative --
FAQ for your website. FaqMaker can utilize
anchors or even a Lightbox to provide
information to your visitors. Most websites
need an FAQ of some kind, so FaqMaker is a
great solution for this purpose.
This screencast is available to RapidWeaver
Classroom subscribers and can be found underneath
the section of Loghound plugins. Enjoy!
yabdab software has
releaed an upgrade to its popular PayLoom plugin, now
available as version 2.0, and RapidWeaver
Classroom covers this latest release with 2
new video tutorials. This upgrade brings
some major enhancements to the plugin,
including an on-page shopping cart and
unlimited product options that include price
overrides.
With this release, the previous version of
PayLoom is no longer available, but those
tutorials will remain available for anyone who
owns that version of the plugin.
I have added another tutorial to the weaverPix
plugin section. This tutorial demonstrates how to
customize weaverPix to produce a really
nice-looking slideshow. You will see how it
pays-off to take some time tweaking settings to
get things just right. In this example, a
slideshow is created that mimics the feature
found on the Home page of the iTunes Store.
weaverPix has a lot of flexibility and you will
see another example of that in this latest
screencast.
You can now own all the available
RapidWeaver Classroom tutorials as part of the
"RapidWeaver
Classroom: The Complete Library" DVD.
This DVD is created on-demand, so all of the
tutorials available at the time of purchase
will be included on the DVD. These are the
same high-resolution videos available with a
RapidWeaver Classroom membership. The
previous DVD offering still remains and is
now called "The Essentials" -- and includes
just over 100 of the RapidWeaver Classroom
tutorials.
The RapidWeaver Classroom DVD is a great option
for those who have limited internet access or
travel often, or those with ISP bandwidth
restrictions. Of course, for those who want
access to the latest RapidWeaver Classroom
screencasts, then a subscription is the
best choice.
I am happy to announce that RapidWeaver Classroom
is now covering plugin releases from another
fantastic RapidWeaver plugin developer, Greg Barchard. Our first
tutorial release covers the weaverPix plugin, which
provides a very flexible Flash slideshow
feature to your RapidWeaver projects. There
are two tutorials on the plugin and you will
surely be impressed with the options it
provides over the Photo Album plugin's Flash
slideshow feature.
Be on the lookout for more screencasts on Greg's
projects in the future!
RapidWeaver Classroom has been on Facebook and Twitter for a while now,
but I haven't really promoted it and so I
thought it would be worth blogging about. If
you are an avid Facebook and/or Twitter
user, then become a fan or follow RapidWeaver
Classroom to stay updated with the
latest tutorial releases and other news.
I've also added some widgets to the blog
sidebar, for quick access to the Twitter and
Facebook pages. You never know, there might
even be the occassional promotion especially
for our Twitter followers and Facebook fans!
I have released a new tutorial today that covers
the excellent Table Stacks from Phil
Warrender. There are two table stacks,
available for free, and these really provide
great flexibility in presenting content on
your website. This screencast is available
to RapidWeaver Classroom subscribers, and
can be found under both the Stacks and
"Working with Tables" sections.
I am happy to announce the release of 3 new video
tutorials covering the excellent RapidCart 2 plugin. This
is an update to the RapidCart plugin that
has already received the RapidWeaver
Classroom treatment. RapidCart 2 adds a ton
of enhancements that really makes it
stand-out as an exceptional e-commerce
plugin for RapidWeaver. You can enable
multiple payment processors, such as PayPal
and Google Checkout, and there is a lot of
flexibility and customization options for
your e-commerce page in RapidCart 2.
These new screencasts are available to
subscribing RapidWeaver Classroom students.
Enjoy!
Two new screencasts have been produced and both
involve ways to add video to your RapidWeaver
website. The first screencast covers the new
EasyTube Gallery plugin,
which provides a great way of displaying
videos from YouTube. The second screencast
covers a bundle of Video Stacks, to be used
in conjunction with the Stacks plugin. There
are 13 stacks in all that can be used to
embed video from YouTube, Viddler, Flickr,
Vimeo, QuickTime and Twitter-related video
services. These two screencasts are now
available to RapidWeaver Classroom
subscribers.
While on the subject of add-ons for the Stacks
plugin, these add-ons or “custom stacks” have
really taken off over the last couple of months.
I’m really excited about this as these stacks are
providing all kinds of functionality that is very
easy to implement. As a result I will be
producing more screencasts on what I consider to
be the best of these custom stacks, so expect to
see more tutorials in this area very soon!
I have released a new tutorial in the “How to...”
lesson. The tutorials covers the creation of
anchors. An anchor is used to link text or an
image to another location on the same webpage.
It’s great for an FAQ, or for a long page divided
into sections. This tutorial is specific to
RapidWeaver 4.0, which allows you to add custom
attributes in the Add Link panel. It’s very
simple to do and can be very handy!
Today I’ve added a new free RapidWeaver
tutorial on how to accept registration
and payment through your website. Using the
right combination of plugins, you can
provide a process by which a visitor
completes a registration form and then is
presented with a method for paying. This is
a great solution for events that require
registration and payment, such as
conferences, classes, etc. The tutorial
presents several different methods of
accomplishing this, from using the basic
Contact Form page with a PayPal button, to a
FormLoom page that redirects to a PayLoom
page. See the video embedded below, or visit
the Curriculum page for
this and other free tutorials. Enjoy!
Today marks the release of a new lesson of “How
to...” tutorials at RapidWeaver Classroom. These
tutorials are found under Section 301 in the
RapidWeaver
Curriculum, and it’s an area that will
be added to very consistently in the future.
I love teaching new 3rd-party plugins as
they are released, but it’s important to
cover different methods of accomplishing
needs, and so that’s what I hope to address
with the “How to...” lesson. Three new
tutorials have been produced to kick-start
the lesson, and these cover:
customizing a header
creating a sign-up form
accepting payment or donations through your
website
For quite a while I have been accepting
feedback from RapidWeaver Classroom students, and
as part of the feedback I ask what types of
tutorials they would like to see in the future.
This is one area where these types of requests
may be fulfilled, so I’m excited to hear what all
of you are wanting to learn and I will do my best
to satisfy as many request as possible!
It’s been a busy week that has culminated in the
release of video tutorials on 3 separate
RapidWeaver plugins. Yesterday saw the release of
tutorials covering GoogaLoom and RapidCart, and
now there are new tutorials available for the
TabLoom plugin -- YabDab Software’s latest
offering. TabLoom provides a great method
for organizing a lot of content on a single
page, by breaking the content into separate
sections inside of a nice, tabbed interface.
A total of 3 videos are available on TabLoom
-- combine those with the 3 others released
yesterday and that’s a total of 6 new
screencasts this week totaling close to an
hour of new training!
With the TabLoom and GoogaLoom tutorials now
available, RapidWeaver Classroom is up-to-date on
all the current offerings from YabDab Software.
The goal of covering all major RapidWeaver
plugins at RapidWeaver Classroom is getting very
close to completion, so check back often for
announcements on more new tutorials coming soon!
Last week I updated the RapidWeaver video
training library with all-new Stacks screencasts. Now
you may be confused because there were
already Stacks screencasts there before, but
those were ones created by YourHead, and now
that they have received the RapidWeaver
Classroom treatment, I have replaced the
YourHead versions with my own. So you will
now receive the detail and explanation for
Stacks that you are used to getting with the
other plugin tutorials! Thanks to Isaiah at
YourHead for letting me post his video
tutorials until I had completed them myself.
Speaking of Stacks, did I mention that it is the
greatest plugin I've ever used?! Now that's
completely my opinion, but I absolutely LOVE this
plugin! As an aside, this new RapidWeaver
Classroom design is done almost entirely with
Stacks. So what are you waiting for? Go watch the
new tutorials on this awesome plugin!
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a topic of
such frequent discussion that I felt the new SEO
tutorials here at RapidWeaver Classroom should be
available for free for everyone to view. The SEO
tutorials are now available for viewing in both
the subscribers' area and for free on the
Curriculum page
(scroll to the bottom of the page). Note
that the free videos are hosted by Vimeo in
HD, but enrolled students should watch them
in the subscribers' area to view them in a
bit better quality.
Feel free to leave comments here on these videos,
and let me know what kinds of questions I did not
address. SEO is such a huge topic that it could
certainly warrant more video instruction in the
future.
The RWmultitool section has been updated with a
new screencast covering the full version of
RWmultitool. This full
version provides a lot of features not
available in the free, Lite version of the
application. This screencast is available to
RapidWeaver Classroom subscribers only.
I have added a new video tutorial covering
RWmultitool Lite, the
free version of this great tool. RWmultitool
allows you to easily modify images in a
theme without needing to modify the theme
directly, and without needing a graphic
design application like Photoshop.
The full version of RWmultitool will be covered
in future screencasts, so stay tuned for more!
I have added a new series of screencasts on the
excellent FormLoom plugin from yabdab
software. FormLoom is a more powerful
contact form plugin for RapidWeaver, and it
includes a lot of great features to offer
flexibility that the built-in Contact Form
plugin doesn't include. There are currently
3 FormLoom screencasts
available and one more will likely be
produced in the near future. Current
RapidWeaver Classroom subscribers can
immediately access these tutorials for
viewing!
I have added a new screencast today to the
Carousel lesson, covering the creation of a
custom Carousel Style. Carousel allows you to
create your own style using images for the
background and buttons, so if you are comfortable
with creating these graphics then you can have a
very custom carousel to display on your website.
Stay tuned for more soon on the GoogaLoom and
FormLoom plugins.
New screencasts have been added covering the
great Carousel plugin from YourHead Software. There
are currently 3 tutorials available to
RapidWeaver Classroom subscribers, and one
or two more are likely to be produced in the
near future. Check back often as new video
tutorials are added weekly!
Back in January I made an informal announcement
here on the blog that RapidWeaver Classroom had
surpassed the milestone of 100 video tutorials.
Well, an official announcement and
special offer has been posted over at
the RealMac Software Support
Forum, and to spoil the surprise a bit I
will tell you that there is a discount
involved! So jump over to the announcement thread,
leave a comment and take advantage of this
limited-time special!
I am pleased to announce that 5 new tutorials
have been added for the new Stacks plugin from
YourHead Software. This
is a first for RapidWeaver Classroom as
these tutorials are produced by Isaiah
himself! He did such a great job that we
wanted to make them available to all
RapidWeaver Classroom subscribers and
visitors -- so these tutorials can be viewed
publicly from the Curriculum page or
from the members' area.
I am likely to produce our own RapidWeaver
Classroom tutorials on Stacks in the future, but
for now these tutorials provide a great overview
of the plugin, along with some specific uses.
Thanks to Isaiah for the screencasts on this
great new plugin, and for all of his
contributions to the RapidWeaver community!
Another ExtraContent tutorial has been released,
detailing the new PlayMore theme from seyDesign. PlayMore
offers three ExtraContent areas that provide
all kinds of flexibility for presenting
content. Thanks to Adam Merrifield at
seyDesign for his outstanding RapidWeaver
themes!
New video releases continue today with the
introduction of the Accordion plugin from
YourHead Software. Two
Accordion screencasts are now available and
one or two more will likely be added to
conclude that series. Accordion is a very
useful plugin, and we use it right here at
RapidWeaver Classroom to present our FAQ. Enjoy!
I am happy to announce the addition of free
tutorials in the iWeb to
RapidWeaver section of the website,
which has been created recently to help iWeb
users transition from iWeb to RapidWeaver.
These iWeb to RapidWeaver tutorials will
cover some of the basic steps that are
recommended in order to rebuild an iWeb
website in RapidWeaver. There are currently
3 video tutorials available, with a couple
of additional ones to come soon. These free
tutorials are hosted using the Viddler
service, and the high-quality versions will
soon be made available to subscribers in the
members’ area of RapidWeaver Classroom.
Three new screencasts covering the Collage 2
plugin have been added to the members’ area of
RapidWeaver Classroom. Collage 2 is a fantastic
plugin from YourHead Software that is exclusive
to RapidWeaver 4.0, while the original Collage
plugin is still available for RapidWeaver 3.6 and
earlier. Collage 2 has a multitude of uses, so
check-out the Collage 2 screencasts
to learn more!
I have published one more screencast for the
PayLoom plugin that shows an example of how
multiple PayLoom pages can be used in a project
to sell multiple categories of items. It also
shows a working, online example of PayLoom pages
and their interaction with PayPal for shopping
cart and checkout functionality.
Look for Collage 2 screencasts to begin appearing
next week!
Hot on the heels of our
Greybox tutorial comes two new screencasts
covering the PayLoom plugin. PayLoom lets you
easily create an e-commerce store on your website
that integrates with PayPal. You really can’t ask
for a simpler way to add products for sale to
your website. One more PayLoom screencast will be
added soon.
You will also notice the Collage 2 logo has been
added under the 3rd-party plugins section. This
plugin will be covered next, so keep an eye out
for more information!
