Your website has standard Headers and Footers and sometimes contains elements within a page that change on a regular basis; Special Offers, for instance. As an experienced Weaver, you probably use Stack's Partials so that when you make alterations to a single element, your site will automatically update everywhere that a partial is used. The problem is that if your partial contains an image that image will be downloaded each time you load a new page that contains that image.

Enter Portal from Joe Workman. Portal is a set of two stacks and a theme. The theme is important and MUST be used for your Portal In stack pages. It ensures that your content is correctly saved as .php elements and can be imported with the Portal Out stack.
The Portal Out stack then outputs your Portal content on every page that it's required. As a simple mnemonic, just remember that with the IN stack, you're putting content into the Portal, with the OUT stack, you're requesting data out of the Portal.

Instead of publishing your complete website (as is often necessary when using Partials), you only need to publish your altered Portal IN pages to ensure that all of your content is automatically updated. And the added advantage is that any images contained within a Portal page are cached so that they don't need to be reloaded. This is a game changer!

Using Portal is conceivably simple: build a Portal IN page that contains the content that needs to be repeated (using the Portal theme). Add a Portal OUT stack to a page that needs duplicate content and define the page that you wish to import. Publish.
Remember that you are using .php and that whilst RW can now render .php pages, you need to preview your Portal page before you can preview the imported pages.

Portal works with any theme, but there's a bonus for Foundation users. the IN stack has a setting for Foundation so that, if you use Foundation specific stacks on your portal page, you will not see the message that you haven't used the Foundation theme (remember, you MUST use the Portal theme for everything to work).

Partials – Great, but old hat! My future websites will use Portal instead!

If Weavers wish to add a series of audio clips to their pages, they could obviously use a sophisticated stack such as PlayLister, a cool stack from Stacks4Stacks. However for a collection of short clips, PlayLister would be overkill in most cases.

Let's say that you want to add short teasers from your group's latest album, or a collection of bird songs…
Soundboard, the latest stack from Stacks4Stacks, is the ideal solution. Just drop a soundboard stack into your page, link to MP3 files you've added as resources, or files stored online, add images/buttons and/or captions as necessary and you're good to go.

Soundboard has a simple user interface and is intended for more uncomplicated setups where advanced features such audio controls, dynamic playlists, sequential playback and extended captioning aren't required. SoundBoard lists your MP3 tracks as attractive buttons and make them instantly available for playback in HTML5 format. Soundboard works in practically any modern web browser and on mobile devices.

The buttons are presented in a responsive CSS grid. You can either apply the same background styling to all buttons or customise button backgrounds individually on a button-by-button basis. The completed result is a tidy and particularly user-friendly interface. To play an MP3 track, simply click or press its button. To stop the MP3 track playing, press the button a second time, press an adjacent button, or click anywhere on the page.


Stack settings
Soundboard Grid Width – XS, SM, MD, LG, XL – %
Item Margin
Border Colour
Border Radius
Border Weight
Button Opacity – Status #1 (playing), Status #2
Button Padding
Fill Style – Inherit, Colour Fill, Vertical/Horizontal/Diagonal/Radial Gradient, Single Image, Tiled Image
Lebel Align – Left, Centre, Right
Label Colour - Status #1 (playing), Status #2
Label Style – B, I, Upper Case, Underlined
Label Size
Transition Speed

Soundboard was designed specifically for RapidWeaver, you won't find the code anywhere else on the web. It is, without a doubt, the ideal stack for publishing short audio clips.

Websites that display calendars have two core functions: They show upcoming events and they display event details. Ideally, the calendar should be aesthetically pleasing with an uncluttered user interface. Beyond good looks, the design should help you tell different kinds of events apart and present a bird’s eye view of them at any screen width.

Kalendar from Weavium not only fulfils all of the above, it also offers tons of styling options and supports 20+ different languages. Kalendar can display public calendars from Google, Outlook, or any other calendar that has an iCal address, and event details written in markdown will automatically be converted. And, of course, Kalendar looks great on mobile devices too.

You can, of course, also create calendars and events within RapidWeaver and publish them directly.
Kalendar can load calendars from multiple sources at the same time and if you feel so inclined, you could display a Google, an iCal (sorry, Apple Calendar) and a manually published calendar etc. at the same time.

Kalendar is extremely simple to set up; just add the iCal-URL of the calendar that you wish to display; configure the colours, fonts, sizes and breakpoints – and in typical Weavium fashion, there's hardly anything that can not be configured – and you're good to go.

I already have two calendar solutions for RapidWeaver, but the next time I need to publish a list of events, Kalendar will most likely be my 'go-to' solution, most especially due to the configurability (i.e. markdown) of the events.

There are a couple of stacks available that will filter RapidWeaver content; some more, some less complicated. One Little Designer has just released what is probably the least complicated filter stack available today.

Filter grid does exactly what it says on the tin. A grid of content that is filterable. Drag Filter Grid into a Stacks page and your first row of content is almost finished. All that's missing is your content. Drag any combination of content into a Filter Grid Column, add comma separated tags and you're ready to fly!
The possibilities are endless: Portfolios, travel catalogues, product catalogues, if it needs to be filtered, Filter grid is the simplest solution!

Filter grid is child's play to set up, does not require PHP and is very effective. See it on a site near you soon!

The 'experts' currently agree unanimously that CSS Grids are the future of web design. In a couple of years time, those same experts will most likely come up with a different description of where the web is heading, but currently CSS Grids is IT!
But how are we supposed to take advantage of CSS Grids in RapidWeaver?

At the end of last year, Will Woodgate began work on a stack named Intrinsic. Today, the final version of Intrinsic has been released and it's going to alter your concept of page layout.

During the 90s, if we wanted to build a more complicated layout, we were forced to use tables. Then CSS came along and seemingly solved all our layout problems, we discovered, however, that CSS wasn't up to the task of positioning those more complicated elements. Flexbox is great, but only for one dimensional layouts, it doesn't really help with those 2D layouts, so now we've moved on to CSS Grids.
Intrinsic from Stacks4Stacks will build the most intricate CSS Grids for you!

Intrinsic is a little more complicated than your average stack. It can assist you in building complete responsive pages, but you'll need to study the way that it works. There's new terminology that you may need to learn, but once you get to grips with Intrinsic's layout, you'll find that it's actually quite straightforward.

Here's an extremely simple example:


And here are the settings that were necessary:

In the example above, I have defined a two-column layout. Column one is 600px wide; column two is set to 'auto'. I have named the Grid Items (the stack containers shown in red) 'one, two, three, side and footer'.
The Grid Template Areas is set to 'one side', 'two side' 'three side' 'footer footer'. The resulting layout displays the Grid Items one, two and three below each other, with the 'side' Item to the right of them. the 'footer' fills the two last columns.

The Grid Template Areas describe your layout. Intrinsic supports up to twelve columns and unlimited rows. When you drag a new Intrinsic stack into your page, the Grid Template Areas contains the description for a twelve column layout.

Each Grid Item must have a unique alphanumeric ID. Either letter/number combinations or short words. Numbers must be combined with at least one letter.
'A B' 'C B' 'D B' 'E E', for example, or 'one side' 'two side' 'three side' 'footer footer' would both result in the layout shown above (I personally prefer the short names, because they help identify the Grid Items more easily).

You'll notice in the screenshot above that the breakpoint is set to 'Screens > 0px Wide'. Each time you add a Grid Breakpoints Child Stack, you can redefine your layout above the breakpoint that you set in the stack settings.

MUCH more complicated designs than the example above can be built with Intrinsic. Just take a look here at one of Will's demo pages. The page is fully responsive, as is the example on the S4S Intrinsic page.

Intrinsic Grid Items can contain any stack that you want to throw at them.
Spend a little time to discover how Intrinsic works and you'll completely rethink the way that your pages can be played out!

NOTE: to view the Intrinsic demo file, you'll need to download the demo version of the Themeflood RWSkinz theme.