Changes in this free update include the following:

• Updated jQuery and now always loaded locally.
• Improved ability to have multiple SimpleSearch instances on the same page.
• New checkbox option to hide the search box (so only search results get shown).

This update is available now via the update checker in the Stacks Library. For more information about SimpleSearch 2, please see its product page here.

Changes in this free update include:

• New checkbox option to loop HTML5 video.
• New checkbox option to display video inline on mobile (enabled by default).
• Resolves an issue of the MP4 poster image not showing correctly.
• Resolves an issue of an MP4 video potentially having the wrong aspect ratio in some themes.

As always, you can download this free update using the update checker in your Stacks Library. If you like the idea of being able to embed an HTML5 video, YouTube or Vimeo video in your website with custom controls, take a look at the product page for MultiPlayer here and download the free trial version.

This free update for MiniCookie features the following changes:

• Adds advanced settings for you to customise the ID (scope) and an optional class selector name for each instance of MiniCookie. This is useful now MiniCookie is blacklisted by ad blockers and annoyance blockers. It enables you to thwart blockers by means of allocating a unique namespace to MiniCookie (like your website or company name), instead of using generic selectors like mini_cookie_stack that are now blocked.
• CSS code added for box-sizing properties, to improve the consistency of checkbox and button styling in different themes and frameworks.

Please see the product page for more details.

Changes in this free update include the following:

• Checkbox setting to disable the download button.
• Checkbox setting to disable the full screen button.
• Checkbox setting to disable the picture-in-picture (PIP) button.
• Checkbox setting to disable the playback rate (speed) button.

My thanks as always to a kind user (ZTM) who proposed, tested and kindly contributed towards this update.

More details about VideoStack can be read here. This is possibly the most feature-rich free video embed solution that exists for RapidWeaver.

Some big changes and exciting developments are coming in 2024. Be sure to be following me on Mastodon if you want some sneak-peaks ahead of everybody else.

Changes in this free update include the following:

• Fixed an issue whereby horizontal scroll bars might get shown in some instances on mobile.
• New colour pickers for subpage links on mobile.
• New indentation setting for subpage links in the mobile menu.

This update is available using the automatic update checker in Stacks / RapidWeaver. More details about Gator can be read here.

By popular demand, I’m doing a little Black Friday promo. Simply 33% off all themes and stacks between now and 1st December 2023. Use the free demo version links on the website, and if you like what you see in RapidWeaver, just checkout in the normal way. No minimal spend or promo code is needed. Everything is RapidWeaver Classic and Stacks 5 compatible.

I also have some slots available in December for any freelance web development work or consulting you need. Including things like RapidWeaver troubleshooting, website publishing, search engine optimisation, accessibility and privacy audits, custom themes or stacks, databases, coding and more. Feel free to get in touch through my website with some details of what you’re needing help with, and I’ll reply quickly with some ideas and a cost.

Changes in version 2.1.0 include the following:

• Changed the order of some settings shown in the Stacks side panel.
• Fixed an issue of ‘display between’ and 'display outside’ date ranges not working correctly.
• A new checkbox option to show alternative content, when normal content is hidden.
• New and improved timezone settings; more to choose from and in a better order.

Note: after installing this free update, you may be required to re-select your preferred timezone again, for each instance of the stack. You will see that the list of supported timezones has grown substantially. If this is of inconvenience to you, please don’t install this update at the present time.

Learn more…

Changes in this free update for Locator include:

• A new Gesture Handling select menu, to replace the previous Scrollwheel Zoom checkbox.

This update is available via the update checker window in Stacks.

Changes in this free update for Indexer include the following:

• New checkbox in Advanced Settings to apply autofocus on the search box. When enabled, it specifies that the search box should automatically get focus when the page loads.
• Compatibility improvements with some web hosting providers, lacking file_get_contents() support.
• Removed the duplicate ’/’ from the sitemap path, for RapidWeaver sitemap.xml files.

This update is available via the update checker inside Stacks.

Changes in this free update for MicroBlog include the following:

• Adds support for the new Tumblr post editor.
• Compatibility improvements for web servers running PHP 8.2+
• New labels and tooltips for a few settings.
• Added a checkbox to reverse article title / date ordering.

The update is available from the website or via the update checker in Stacks.

Changes in this free update for CommentsStack include the following:

• New setting for pagination padding, to improve appearances when pagination buttons span multiple lines.
• Target the Font Awesome icons in buttons with colouring, to override colouring set by some themes.
• Support for multiple CommentsStacks being used on the same page.
• Omit suffix line breaks in the ratings datafile, to permit more reliable calculations using RatingsStack.
• Updated some labels and informational tooltips.
• The comments form is the correct width in certain themes and frameworks.
• Toggle between preset or custom ratings markup, using a new checkbox option.
• Border radius setting on the submit button is working correctly.
• Checkbox to toggle the reset button on and off.
• Default label text for the reset button includes a Font Awesome icon.
• New style settings for the reset button, to make it more prominent in non-Bootstrap themes.
• Optional checkbox to allow the reset button to also close the form, in addition to clearing form data.
• Horizontal rules in the comments form inherit their colour from the input borders.

This update is available via the update checker inside your Stacks Library.

Learn more…

The new Obfuscator stack replaces the older TouchBase stack. Beyond the name change, Obfuscator has the following changes:

• Obfuscate practically any link type; beyond just email addresses, telephone numbers and Skype handles.
• Compatibility with newer versions of PHP.
• Toggle obfuscation of link labels (button text) on and off with ease.
• Generate the code for obfuscated links that can be used elsewhere in your website; including paragraphs, footers, banners, sidebars and even entirely separate websites.
• More button styles and theme / framework support. Plus an ability to append or prepend button icons.
• Optional custom link attributes for more advanced configurations.
• Refreshed user interface. Complete with options like viewing sample links directly within RapidWeaver.

As its name suggests, Obfuscator converts email addresses and other contact details into encoded, obfuscated links. Normal ‘human’ visitors to a website see no difference in how an obfuscated link looks or behaves. However for spam bots and other nasties, they typically just see gibberish code! Therefore Obfuscator can potentially be a powerful asset in helping reduce the amount of automated spam and other unsolicited communications getting to you via website links. Particularly if you have an aversion to using CAPTCHA or other more intrusive anti-spam measures.

Yes, some free tools already exist online that can do obfuscated links. However most of these only support email links. Some use Javascript to obfuscate links or leave tell-tale things behind like 'mailto’ or 'tel’ in addresses, which can leave links more susceptible to being found. Whereas Obfuscator obfuscates the whole link with server-side PHP.

Until 1st April 2023, I’m providing Obfuscator as a free upgrade for all my customers of TouchBase. Most customers have already been contacted by email this morning with a download link. Although some emails have bounced and other people had opted out of email updates. So if you have not received your copy yet, just drop me a message via the Stacks4Stacks website with your receipt attached, and we’ll sort you out with a copy of this new stack.

Obfuscator has very-much been shaped into this highly-capable stack, thanks in part to valuable feedback received from actual users. My hope is that this entirely new stack fulfills all your obfuscation needs in RapidWeaver.

Learn more…

This update for TopBox adds support for M4A, AAC, FLAC and WAV audio formats. You can obtain this version via the updates checker in Stacks.

This update for the Curtains stack includes the following changes:

• Expands the choice of cookie options, including settings for websites with SSL. 
• Adds a ‘missingURL’ key for Stacks.
• Deletes some surplus icons from unsupported versions of Stacks and RapidWeaver.

Changes in this free update for Paperless include the following:

• Adds separate table columns for file changed and file modified dates.  
• Improvements to date sorting.
• Removed Moment.js that was causing Javascript errors in some situations.

This update can be downloaded via the updates window inside Stacks.

This free update for PlayLister adds the option to display an ‘inline’ download button on the main control bar, for the downloading of audio files. This is in addition to the download button you can already display in the top portion of the interface. As before, download buttons typically only work for audio files being hosted on the same web server that PlayLister is published on.

Just in time for the holiday season. This is a major update for the uTube stack, available as a free download from today.

uTube has surely got to be the most feature-rich YouTube stack that exists for RapidWeaver! Unlike the standard embed code that YouTube already provides, uTube unlocks some secret configurations that you perhaps never knew existed. Plus some extra optimisations exclusively for RapidWeaver-built websites. All packaged inside a familiar drag-and-drop interface with simple GUI controls in the Stacks side panel.

The result of many hours consulting, research, development and testing; the updated uTube 5 stack incorporates the following changes…

• New, longer, higher-resolution 1080p sample video to experiment with.
• Fixes an edge case bug with the Source framework applying extra borders and padding on iFrames.
• Adds support for YouTube Shorts.
• If the playlist is enabled, the box to type in IDs is now taller.
• Added a missingURL key to Info.plist.
• New ‘Enable Privacy-Enhanced Mode’ checkbox. When enabled, YouTube claims not to not to store information or create cookies for your website users, unless they play the video. Good for website privacy compliance.
• Deleted 'mobile actions’ because by now, nearly all modern smartphones can play YouTube.
• Internal changes to make stack templates referenced as an array, per API recommendations.
• Viewing macros updated to API 9, to support future versions of Stacks.
• Added accelerometer, autoplay, clipboard-write, encrypted-media, gyroscope and picture-in-picture attributes to the iFrame tag, to future-proof things further on the frontend.
• Tidied the underlying source code and reduced its overall size for faster page loads.
• Renamed and reordered a couple of stack settings for easier and quicker setup.
• Lazy loading is achieved using the HTML 'loading’ attribute, instead of relying on jQuery. This new method uses significantly less code, is more reliable and well supported in modern web browsers.
• New select menu to choose a video format preset or to set a custom size.
• The ability to hide the video in print / PDF output can be toggled on and off.
• A new setting to exclude video resizing in jQuery FitVids.js (sometimes still included with old or unsupported RapidWeaver themes).
• Updated a couple of the informational tooltips shown against some settings, to make things easier to understand.

An illustration of a ‘YouTube Short’ video now supported by uTube and the expanded choice of new settings displayed within the Stacks side panel:

This update is available via automatic updates in Stacks or you can grab a fresh download from the product page here.

All existing instances of uTube in your websites should update without any issue. But as always, it’s suggested you have reliable backups of your files and you check pages before re-publishing them. Some settings (like lazy loading) may require applying again, if you want to continue using them.

If you like using this stack, please consider how much time it has saved you and make a donation here. Donations help towards the resources needed to keep stacks like uTube available for you to use. Please pay what you think the stack is worth. Or contribute in some other way, like writing a Trustpilot review.

Merry Christmas and best wishes for the New Year!

This free update for MastoStack includes the following changes:

• ‘Access Token’ input is now a multi-4 type input, to display longer tokens.
• Removed older icons for versions of RW and Stacks no longer supported.
• New options to add Mastodon website verification code.

Here is a screenshot of the new settings you have for self-verifying webpage ownership with Mastodon. And the great thing is that it won’t cost you $8 a month!

Mastodon has existed for several years. I’ve had an account on there since 2017, back when there were only a few thousand of us on the platform! If you don’t care for all the hatred and hostilities main stream social media (like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook) love to revel in, then Mastodon offers a safe refuge. It’s engineered around the core fundamentals of how a social media platform should look and work.

This update for FileTree adds a new ‘Iteration Start’ setting. This controls how many sub-directories or files must be present inside a directory, before it will toggle open.

FileTree is compatible with both Stacks 4 and Stacks 5. A web server running PHP 8 or above is recommended. As of last week, PHP 7.x is now ‘end of life’ and no longer receiving support or updates, unless your hosting company has purchased LTS (long term support) through a separate provider, to keep PHP 7 patched for a little longer.

You can download this FileTree update via automatic updates in RapidWeaver or re-download the stack from here.

My extended thanks to Mark, who took the time to do some detailed testing of this new feature and sponsored it. FileTree + FileMan are a powerful combination of stacks.

By request, I’m offering a discount off all my RapidWeaver themes and stacks. Anything purchased from Stacks4Stacks and ThemeFlood between 22nd November and 30th November will have a 22% discount applied at the checkout.

To keep things simple… 

• The 22% discount is already applied at the checkout for you. There is no promo code you need to enter yourself.
• No minimum purchase value or quantity. So you can mix and match themes or stacks of any value. 
• Free trial versions remain available for everything. Just be sure to complete your purchase before 30th November if you want the discounted price.
• Fast and friendly support remains available if you have any questions about themes or stacks.

As mentioned before, I’ve never been a big fan of Black Friday events. I get the impression they were invented by big US retailers to clear all their unsold inventory piled high in warehouses, prior to more container loads of throw-away junk coming in from China for the next year! It’s not really a business model I think suits RapidWeaver add-ons all that well. I already provide more free add-ons and support than any other RapidWeaver developer does, making discounting hard to justify. But the reality is that just about every retailer now does some-sort of promotion about now, so it has come to be expected.

So to compensate, I’m offering anybody who has purchased any themes or stacks from me (at their full, non-discounted price) in 2022 free copies of the new NavGrid and TouchNav stacks. Just a small way of saying “thanks” for your support and longer-term loyalty. Just contact me (via email, Discord or Mastodon) on the support page, attach a proof of purchase and a covering note. If you’re eligible, I’ll get copies of both stacks sent over to you.

-Will.

Changes in this free update for v2 users include…

• Fixes an issue that caused image icons to not display if added as RW    resources.
• The text label box is now of a ‘multi-2’ type to support more text and font icons.

For more information about Badger, please click here.

In this free update, some new options have been added to display native HTML audio players, within the Advanced Settings.

For more information about InlinePlayer, please click here.

Changes in this free stack update for Paperless include the following:

• New checkbox option in Paperless Style Settings to hide the table header row.
• Removed duplicate ‘Info Text’ box.
• Translations for 'Filtered Entries’ are correctly written into the JS.
• Added icon support for db (SQLite), JSON, aiff, wma, flac, alac, heic, hevc and webm.
• Split the audio and video icons into two separate groups for easier configuration.
• Preview buttons use the same default hover colour scheme as download buttons.
• Paperless now supports 'print’ buttons, in addition to existing preview and download buttons.

I have written further information on the product page about what the new ‘print’ buttons do and how they work.

For more information about Paperless, please click here.

Changes in this update include:

• The RW resources image source now correctly works if the website is published into a subdomain on the hosting server.
• Images added via RW resources can be sorted into ascending or descending order.

Automatic updates are supported in both Stacks 4 and Stacks 5. This is the best way to download and install stack updates.

Learn more about ProGallery by clicking here.

A major update for Stacks was released yesterday by Yourhead Software. Some of the most noteworthy new features in this update include:

• A new ‘Stacks’ menu item in RapidWeaver listing a choice of common actions.
• More keyboard shortcuts when editing stacks.
• Additional viewing and sorting options for the Stacks Library.
• Page Statistics, to provide an overview of what stacks are being used in a page.
• Expanded the choice of preferences.
• Updates ‘under the hood’ to improve speed, performance and stability.

As always, you can learn more about the Stacks plugin here on the Yourhead Software website. There are some tutorials to watch on the website.

As of writing this, Stacks 5 currently costs $29.95 USD if upgrading from Stacks 4, or $49.95 USD if you are buying Stacks for the first time.

Every stack listed on the Stacks4Stacks website is already Stacks 5 compatible. You do not need to request updates for anything. 

As always, just ensure you have all your addons and project files backed-up, before starting the upgrade. You can post any questions you have about Stacks to the RapidWeaver Community Forums.

Changes in this free update to SortStack include the following:

• Increased the number of sortable categories to 25.
• Refactored some of the internal codebase.

More information…

A single change in this free update:

• Added new settings to change the mouse cursor style.

Please click here to learn more about this stack.

Changes in this free update include:

• Added some additional PHP code to encode and decode special characters (like accents) being used in email bodies.
• The box for typing email bodies in the stack settings is now a ‘multi-8’ type, to provide more space.

Learn more…

This has got to be one of the easiest and most customisable Vimeo video embed stack available for RapidWeaver! Featuring fully mobile responsive scaling and powerful playback settings. Version 2 is has been released today. A major update for VimStack, with the following changes…

• Updated the default video ID.
• New select menu to change the video playback quality.
• New settings to set a custom start time of the video.
• New checkbox option to mute videos.
• New checkbox option to toggle ‘do not track’ between on and off.
• New checkbox option to toggle keyboard controls.
• New checkbox option to toggle PIP (Picture In Picture) on and off.
• New checkbox option to turn off 'plays inline’ for mobile devices.
• New checkbox option to toggle the display of author profile images.
• New checkbox option to toggle playback speed controls on and off.
• New checkbox option to enable background videos.
• New checkbox option to toggle bylines on and off.
• New checkbox option to toggle auto pause on and off.
• Updated developer credit to include website link and Twitter handle.
• Deleted surplus icons not needed any more.

The product page for VimStack has also been updated today can can be found here.

VimStack remains a free stack to download. But please, if you find it useful in your websites, consider making a small contribution here. RapidWeaver addon revenue and donations have been in serious decline in recent months. Even by simply sharing good words about these addons on the community forums and social media all helps.

A free update for existing customers. Changes in this image effect stack for RapidWeaver include the following:

• Apply title attributes to warehoused images.
• Apply custom attributes to warehoused images.
• New checkbox to enforce strict warehoused image widths and heights.

This update is available via automatic updates in Stacks. Click here to learn more about ImageWizard and to download a free trial version.

Slinky can best be described as a ‘hybrid’ between a collapsible accordion and a website navigation menu.

Changes in version 3:

• A couple of minor bug fixes and browser compatibility improvements. 
  
• Reorganised and renamed some settings, to make setup easier.
  
• Drop down content now inherits more styling from your theme, for quicker configuration and greater consistency.
  
• No more image arrows! Bring along and use Font Awesome (or similar) icons instead, configurable to any design, size or colour.
  
• Removed surplus code for browsers that are no longer supported (e.g. Internet Explorer).
  
• Many more style settings for page links, descriptions and drop down content.
  
• Ability to set page links to open in a new browser tab or apply other custom attributes (like lightbox triggers and event listeners).
  
• Added some meta data and other pieces of information (like missingURL) required for Stacks 4.
  
• Better informational tooltips for many of the settings.
  

Learn more…

The basic premise of CoverOver is to hide underlying website content with an overlay. Such uses could include displaying important messages, overlaying a slideshow or video with introductory text, or pre-warning site visitors about sensitive or upsetting content that might exist.

The full documentation and some examples can be viewed here. CoverOver can be downloaded and installed within Stacks and RapidWeaver, in the normal way. Setup of CoverOver is easy, with the addition of some quick instructions shown to you in edit mode. 

You can use nearly any button stack to create the buttons that open or close the overlay. For example, a configured button to close the overlay would have custom attributes applied like this:

Learn more…

Changes in this free update include:

• Adds compatibility for the forthcoming WebYep 3 release, which in-turn adds support for PHP 8.
  
• Fixes an issue whereby the ‘conditional’ stack could corrupt the page below itself, if the settings were not changed.
  

Follow me on Twitter or drop me an email if you want to be kept informed of a new project I’m planning that relates to WebYep!

Learn more…

Disco embeds a Discord widget on your RapidWeaver website. It works to display a list of who’s online in your server. It also displays a button for website users to click and join a Discord server from their smartphone, tablet or computer.

Although Discord provides their own similar widget to do this same task, the Disco widget is specially optimised to include responsive sizing, improved edit mode visualisation, and light and dark themes (including auto-detection of dark mode on a computer). Plus a brilliant option to display the widget as a popup, like a chatbot window, pictured below.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the popularity of chat services (like Discord) exploded in popularity; with physical shops and support centres closed and more people working remotely. Despite “lock down“ restrictions easing for some in recent months, many of us have grown fond of using Discord. Particularly with the toxicity of mainstream social media services and the relentless barrage of trackers and advertising.

If you are a user of Discord and you want to promote it to more of your website users, then Disco is a perfect way to accomplish this.

Disco is provided as a free download. But if you find yourself using it in a website or need support for it, please pay a donation.

Changes in this update include:

• Adds a checkbox to toggle the display of hidden directories and files in the outputted file tree list.
• Drops support for PHP 4.
• Increases the recommended PHP version to version 7.4. PHP 8.x is preferable.

This update is available via automatic updates in RapidWeaver or you can re-download it from the product page.

If you enjoy using FileTree, please don’t forget to give it a ”thumbs up“ and write a short review about it on the community addons website. This only takes a couple of moments to do, but greatly helps with promoting the stack to other potential users.

A happy summer bank holiday weekend to you all! Or just a regular weekend, wherever you may be. Those of you who are members of my Discord chat room or have been in communication with me via email may know that I have been very busy working on another sizable update to the MiniCookie stack.

This update actually started around Easter, before version 2.2.0 was released in June. This latest update focuses on adding a couple of user-requested features, fixing a couple of minor quirks and boosting the feature set to see-off the copycat rivalry!

This update has been many hours of coding and testing. I hope it’s everything you want. The full list of changes are as follows:

• Further improvements to the display of consent and multi-consent popups in RapidWeaver edit mode.
• Added a new checkbox option to omit MiniCookie from display on printouts or when you save a webpage as PDF.
• Added some clever options to allow certain tracking cookies to auto-renew. For example, if someone dismisses a consent popup with an expiry of 7 days, then comes back to your website after 5 days, we can automatically reset the expiry date for another 7 days out into the future.
• Added some information to forewarn that some web browsers (namely Safari 15) now cap cookie expiry dates to a maximum of 7 days.
• Only display the ‘placement’ setting for supplementary links, when the configuration is set to 'get user consent (default)’.
• New CSS loading animation effects for the consent popups.
• Added the option to change the popup position to 'modal’ which displays a popup in the dead-centre of the screen.
• Fixes a problem whereby checkboxes might be out of alignment with labels, when using the “Source” theme framework.
• Fixes a problem of the consent popup shadow rendering too hard in Microsoft Edge, specifically on Surface tablets.
• Fixes an issue in some Brandon Lee themes of scrollbars appearing within consent popups. Possibly already fixed by Brandon Lee before this update was published?
• Addresses a possible issue whereby the JS Cookie Plugin might conflict with themes or stacks using an older version of the same plugin.
• Changes to some of the informational tooltips, to make things easier to understand.
• Consent popups and multi-consent popups now support ARIA roles, titles and descriptions. Excellent for improved website accessibility.
• A couple of other minor changes to the underlying source code, particularly towards compatibility of future PHP versions.

Thanks to everybody who participated in the public Beta and gave constructive, meaningful feedback. It was all of great help and your input directly influenced this release.

MiniCookie 2.3.0 is a free update for all paying customers. You can update using automatic updates within Stacks / RapidWeaver. Or grab a copy from your Paddle account.

If you are new to MiniCookie, then all you need to know is that this single stack can confidently handle practically every part of privacy law compliance in your RapidWeaver websites (not just cookies). A free trial version of MiniCookie is available, along with a sample project file to open and play with.

I have completed courses about GDPR, so I’m well-versed with the legal requirements website owners need to follow. I have been able to combine this knowledge with my coding expertise.

Learn more…

Changes in this free stack update include:

• The outline border style applied on focused buttons is now more pronounced.
• Checkboxes within the multi-select consent popup now receive tab focus styling.
• New checkbox and colour picker option to apply a window shade.
• Further accessibility enhancements; like taking and returning tab index focus from the popup.
• Minor improvements to the display of the consent popup in Stacks edit mode.

Learn more…

This is a free update for existing users and adds the following features:

• Bootstrap 5 compatibility, while maintaining backwards compatibility with Bootstrap 4.
• Improves the display of submit buttons on certain new iPhones.
• Ability to submit forms to Formspark.io.
• Ability to submit forms to SheetMonkey.io.
• More custom options for submitting forms using GET or POST methods. Really useful for processing forms using your own custom code.
• The submit button now carries a name attribute, if you need to more reliably determine which form in your website was submitted.
• Support for the new Date/Time Local input, which is steadily gaining support in different web browsers.
• A new custom input, so that practically any custom form input can be added to Formulate.
• Improvements to the range slider input; to add support for steps and a numerical output to the right of the range slider.
• Some input types now have support for additional attributes like autocomplete, disabled, readonly, spellcheck and value.
• New ‘Password’ and 'Search’ input types. Although of limited use to average users, these could be “make or break” for users building highly sophisticated forms with custom backend processing.
• We now validate against pasted content, along with content a user has manually typed in the form fields.
• Expanded the choice of style options available, for custom form styling.
• New 'Honeypot Anti-Spam’ input type to use in conjunction with Formspark or a custom PHP form handler.
• Improvements to select menu styling, to match the same select inputs that Bootstrap 5 uses.
• Optional reset button, as requested by a user.
• Changed the ordering of some stack settings and updated some of the informational tooltips.

This update is available via automatic updates in Stacks and RapidWeaver, to all customers of the Formulate stack.

If you like using Formulate and you appreciate the time that’s gone into this update, please don’t forget to give it a “like” and write a short review about it on the RapidWeaver Community Addons website.

Click here to learn more about Formulate and to download a free trial version.

This is a major update for Expiry, which brings a new editing interface and an expanded choice of customisable settings. You can install Expiry v2 alongside v1.

Expiry is a fantastic stack to use if you want to add some basic “time control” to blocks of content in RapidWeaver. The AdvancedPublisher stack remains a good upgrade if you need even more control.

Please donate if you find Expiry useful and don’t forget to give it a “like” and write a short review about it here on the RapidWeaver community addons website.

A need recently arose to create an extremely simple, HTML5 video player, to support self-hosted MP4 video files. This new stack encompasses all the normal HTML5 video tag attributes. Plus it includes a couple of more specialist features like chapter, subtitle and ExtraContent support.

VideoStack uses the standard web browser media controls. What’s nice about these standard video player controls are that they work straight “out of the box” and support all the basic functions you could want; like play, pause, skip, volume, mute, fullscreen, download, picture-in-picture, Chromecast, captions and subtitles. VideoStack is lightweight, flexible and works practically anywhere.

This could be a good stack for a novice RapidWeaver user to settle into using, as a precursor towards some of the more sophisticated video stacks I sell. But if you do prefer to stick with using VideoStack in your websites, please make a donation to help compensate my time and ensure the stack can be kept available for the long term.

With the Covid-19 crisis deepening in many parts of the world, more and more companies and organisations are needing to permanently shift towards an online presence. Video is becoming an indispensable part of many websites. My hope is that the VideoStack becomes another useful tool in the overall “RapidWeaver toolbox”; towards helping people make this important transition.

Learn more…

Boasting a total of ten effects, the aptly named Underline stack is great for making prominent, block level links underline with beautiful animation effects. This stack would be perfect to use below blocks of written content as a call to action, links positioned as a horizontal navigation bar or a table of contents within a theme ExtraContent container. This novice-friendly stack has a basic array of settings to achieve all the essentials. Links can be set to page anchors, other webpages or external websites. Custom attributes can also be applied in instances where extra code needs attaching to links.

Underline will work with most, but not all RapidWeaver themes. Some themes already apply complicated styling to links, and these styles may override the code or options that the Underline stack uses. Underline stack works with nearly all modern web browsers.

Learn more…

A need recently arose, whereby I was working on a website for a private client built with RapidWeaver and Stacks. We needed to get some images cut-out as simple shapes to place at the top of some text box columns. A quick search online revealed that the CSS clip-path property was the easiest way to accomplish this. No stack seemed to exist that could do this already, so I made one!

CookieCutter is extremely simple to use, with a bare minimum of settings. You can use images dragged and dropped into RapidWeaver or source images from somewhere else like your Resources or a warehouse location. I provide a choice of over 30 “preset“ shapes. The custom shape option does as its label suggests and allows you to supply your own CSS clip-path code.

The benefits of CookieCutter and the CSS clip-path property includes the ability to make non-destructive changes to your images (the shape can be changed or removed entirely in just a click of a mouse). This method also means you don’t need to worry about using image editing software (like Photoshop) to generate big PNG files. Search engines and social media platforms see the original, unmodified image. Same with older web browsers that lack CSS clip-path support.

CookieCutter is provided for free download. But at the very least, please give it a “like“ and write a review about it here on the RapidWeaver community addons website. And if you can afford to, please drop me a small donation. Free addons still cost me time and money to provide the community!

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This update is free for existing users and includes the following changes:

1. Checkbox option to add an optional supplementary link (e.g. ‘More Options’) to the consent popup, displayed alongside the existing 'accept’ button.

2. New side panel left and side panel right popup positioning, to create tall consent popups like https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/ have.

3. Improvements to the display of checkbox consents on newer smartphones.

4. Added a 'max width’ setting in the popup style settings, which is applicable to some of the popup positioning options.

MiniCookie is a single drag-and-drop solution to help you overcome all the technical and legal challenges of making a RapidWeaver website compliant with international privacy laws. Backed by fast and friendly expert support. You can download this latest update for MiniCookie in the updates window, in Stacks/RapidWeaver.

If you have found MiniCookie useful, please give it a “like” and/or a quick review here on the RapidWeaver community addons website.

Changes in this update include:

• Some improvements towards the positioning and display of popups on smartphones, when lots of content needs to be included in a Gateway popup.
• When the positioning is set to Modal Popup, a new checkbox option is shown to center the modal in the middle of the screen.
• If the window shade is enabled, there are some additional new settings to display an extra close button in one of four corners of your webpage.
• A few other minor bug fixes and general improvements.

This update is available to all version 3 users via automatic updates in RapidWeaver / Stacks. The product page for Gateway is available here.

RWML (RapidWeaver Multilingual) remains one of the best packs of stacks for creating multilingual websites in RapidWeaver. It works great, whether you’re building separate “mini sites” for each language or offering options for website user to toggle the display of translated text and other content on a page-by-page basis. A very flexible set of stack elements to make multilingual websites quicker, easier and more reliable to create.

The main change to happen in this RWML update is support for a brand new language switcher. It’s called the “Popup Picker”. This new language switcher works like a modal popup, which greets the user when they first arrive at your website:

The purpose of this new popup picker is to ensure the website user makes their language selection, before they can continue any further. This could be a convenient system to implement; like in examples where you have page elements (such as a cookie popup message) that cannot otherwise be easily translated into multiple languages, owing to screen space or technicality constraints.

By design, the text “hello! - please select your language” alternates in a loop between each language your website supports. The buttons are purposefully big and bold to make language selection easier on a touch device or computer. Superbly well designed and implemented to exceed the highest usability standards.

As you’d expect, almost every aspect of the modal popup and its window shade can be customised to match your existing website.

A bonus feature is some extra cookie tracking. Once the website user has made their language selection from this new popup, they won’t be nagged again for a predetermined length of time! Of course, you can still provide existing language switching options, so a user can easily change their preferred language later on.

This RWML update is a free update for all existing RWML 2.x  users and is available to install via the automatic updater in Stacks / RapidWeaver. The new popup language switcher stack is available for use in your Stacks Library.

More information about RWML is available here on the product page. Please consider giving RWML a “thumbs up” or reviewing RWML over on the RapidWeaver Community Addons website, if you enjoy using it.

• New options for cookie tracking, so you can determine if a website user has viewed and closed your TopBox.
  
• Adds support for the Lbry.tv video platform. You can embed video from this new service directly into TopBox, by taking the URL from the iFrame embed code and appending &autoplay=1 onto the end of the URL. Use a video iFrame in TopBox to display your video. Lbry.tv is an interesting new video sharing platform that’s pitching itself as an alternative to YouTube.
• Improvements to the playback of YouTube content on smartphones.

Customer ratings are a valuable asset on many websites, especially during these difficult times with more businesses switching to online sales.

RatingStack is a free complimentary stack designed primarily to use in conjunction with the CommentsStack. However if you don’t have the CommentsStack, it is still feasible to supply a datafile in the same prescribed format, for RatingStack to use.

The purpose of RatingStack is to take user submitted ratings and produce attractive written narrations, bar charts and star scores to display on your websites. Therefore you can easily convey to website users which products or services are the highest rated.

Formally developed by SeyDesign / Nimblehost, the Charts stack has received a major update this past weekend. To check if you are eligible for a free update, you can login to your Paddle account to see if Charts is listed there. For everybody else, the latest trial version and purchase links for Charts can be found on the product page. Charts is included in the Black Friday promo.

Charts is a handy little stack if you need to convert a CSV spreadsheet file into basic line charts, bar charts, pie charts, scatterplots, area charts, meter gauges or doughnut circles. These can be useful to visually display simple data on websites or webapps. A wide choice of style options within the Charts stack allow you to customise the generated charts and graphs to match your existing theme or corporate branding.

As before, the Charts stack works from a CSV file you supply. Most spreadsheet software can generate CSV files. This offers a quick method towards getting your axis labels and datasets loaded into Charts; with zero code required. Charts does all the hard work for you, to convert your CSV data into beautiful charts. You can either use CSV files added as resources in RapidWeaver or link to CSV files already stored on your web hosting account.

Changes in Charts v3 include:

• Generated charts can now be previewed in RapidWeaver.
• Fixed a problem that resulted in bar and line point labels missing.
• Greatly improved the handling of multiple Chart stacks, when they are configured differently to each other on the same webpage.
• Fixed a problem, whereby graph axis labels would always get shown on the pie and doughnut chart types, where one was not needed.
• New options to specify a maximum width or height, in your preferred units of measurement (e.g. %, px, rem, vw, vh).
• All colour pickers now support RGBa colour opacity.
• Fixed a bug that was causing a thick black line to be rendered under chart canvases in Foundation 6.
• Requested by a user, the starting angle of doughnut and pie charts can now be customised in degrees.
• Updated some stack setting labels and informational tooltips, to make setup quicker and easier.
• Dropped support for Internet Explorer 8 and less. These web browsers have been officially obsolete for some years. Few people use these browsers anymore. This has the benefit of greatly reducing the amount of code everybody else has to load.
• Fixed a bug that caused Meter Gauges to vanish if a chart further up the page had more than 8 data points and labels enabled (yeah - I had hours of fun trying to find and fix this one)!
• New background colour and font size options for chart legends.
• Reorganised and regrouped a few of the stack settings, to make things easier to find.
• As requested by a user, it is now possible to rotate both x-axis and y-axis ticks, on bar and line charts.
• Support has been added for Area Charts. These can be accomplished by using the existing Line Chart type, and selecting the Area Plot checkbox (in Line Chart Options).
• New stack icons and a few other tidbits of information required by newer versions of Stacks and RapidWeaver. Rewrote the buggy ’&&’ operator conditional statements.
• Added the ability to toggle the chart box shadow effects on and off using a single checkbox option.
• Cleaned up ‘edit mode’ to display less information about Charts. Important messages are still displayed if something is configured incorrectly.
• New number box to change the sizing of point labels on bar charts.

Perhaps the biggest feature of all is that Charts is now fully responsive. This means that generated charts or graphs will scale-down to fit tablets and smartphones. Therefore removing the need to create multiple charts for different screen sizes. I know this has been a frequent user request for many years! Major technical hurdles had to be overcome, which meant rewriting a large portion of the underlying codebase and reconnecting all the settings. Charts will now redraw each time the screen is resized or changes orientation.

The product page for Charts has been updated with all new documentation. I have also put together a RapidWeaver 8 project file you can download. This contains several real working examples of Charts that you can experiment with. These tests work with the free trial version of Charts and the paid version.

Charts v3 will identify itself as a new stack and can be installed alongside older versions. Given the magnitude of changes, it will not attempt to convert or update older versions. This newest version of Charts has a bright orange and white icon.

Also of note, I have updated the LineGraph stack too. This one is a good option if you are only interested to making responsive line graphs (including area charts and scatterplots).

50% off the Stacks plugin and other Yourhead Software plugins. See this page for the coupon code, links and T&Cs:

https://post.yourhead.com/w/lmB837ZF6892yskxKk0fyBhw

I think this is the biggest discount that has ever been offered on the Stacks plugin, so it makes it an excellent buy.

This is a major update for Gateway. If you are eligible for a free upgrade, you can download version 3 of Gateway from your Paddle account here. If you are updating from an older version, Gateway is available to buy on my website here.

Gateway was originally devised as a method to display popup alerts or messages on websites (complete with cookie tracking). It still excels at this task. However the premise of Gateway has shifted slightly in recent years, in that it also allows the setup of “off canvas” boxes and sidebars that can be toggled open and closed. Particularly useful for creating mobile / app-like websites. So Gateway is very much a stack with a lot of potential uses!

Changes in this version include:

• Dropped support for Internet Explorer and other older web browsers. Therefore resulting in a smaller, faster, leaner and more optimised codebase, which adds less weight to webpages.
• Removed some of the seldom-used features and settings, to make the stack easier for novice users to configure and to reduce support burdens.
• Secure tracking cookies are now supported, plus cookie paths and cookie domains. A perfect compliment to MiniCookie.
• New transitional effects, to subtlety show and hide Gateway stacks with elegant fading and sliding. These are carefully implemented to promote better accessability and reduce the risk triggering photosensitive epilepsy amoungst some website users.
• Improvements to compatibility, for when Gateway is used in themes and frameworks from other companies. Like Foundation 6, Foundry, Source, etc.
• A new and expanded choice of basic style settings, covering alignment, font styles, positioning and colours. All colour pickers support RGBa opacity.
• More options to choose the positioning of Gateway stacks on a webpage. For example, use the new left or right options to create beautiful slide-out sidebar panels, without needing any custom code.
• Additional flexibility towards creating your own close buttons or links. Any content placed inside a ‘Gateway Close Button’ sub-stack works to close Gateway.
• Overhauled the user interface. Cleaner, fresher, easier to find your way around. Regrouped and reorganised settings into a more convenient list. New tooltips on quite a few settings.
• Minor “under the hood” changes towards Gateway stacks previewing and publishing slightly quicker in newer versions of Stacks. Removed some deprecated Stacks API stuff.
• Tested and ready for jQuery 3.

Please see the product page for the updated documentation and a free trial version for download.

I have also published a sample RapidWeaver 8 project file to download, that demonstrates some of the things possible with Gateway. These examples are ready to copy and paste straight into your own website, if you prefer.

Until 1st January 2021, Gateway is also included in my 40% Black Friday promo. Details of that can be read here. Just pop your coupon code in the box if you want the discounted price, as shown here.