It's been a while since I reviewed a RapidWeaver theme and even longer since I actually used one. Today, I realised why that is…
… when I design a website, I first choose a colour scheme that has some relevance to the site's subject or the client's CD*, then I choose fonts that I feel are appropriate. I usually have a rough layout in my head, which I will then refine as I go along.
Themes such as the new LUX theme from Multithemes are aimed at RW users who may be less creative, or who want to spend less time concentrating on the page structure, users who want to quickly put a site together and publish their content. And that's good; if that weren't possible, there wouldn't be so many good sites online.

Multithemes LUX won't, however, allow you to switch your brain off entirely. Once you've decided on a colour scheme (25 different elements beg your attention), you then need to choose from one of fifteen headline fonts and five fonts for your content. You then have the option to include a background image for each page (tiled, or as a cover image) and then there's an option for an (actually ten different) HTML5 animation overlay, which can be used as an overlay for the background image, or for one of the optional colour backgrounds.

Remember Extra Content? ExtraContent came about when a handful of 3rd party developers got together to address the need for more content spaces in RapidWeaver.
While the content area and sidebar are ample space for the vast majority of RapidWeaver users, there are some who want more flexibility to add content in ways keeping with todays modern web designs.
LUX comes with an Extra Content stack and three options for its positioning 1) Below the Header, 2) Below the page content 3) Within the Menu dropdown.
Which brings me to the navigation menu. The menu is just that: Top right is the word "Menu" with a Plus button. Clicking either opens a navigation overlay which is either just over 50% of the page width or, optionally (Nav Wide), approximately 95% of the viewport width. Extra Content 3 is positioned below the navigation bar that appears, so it's feasible to add a map of your location to the menu, along with company details.

LUX is a theme with a straightforward, very clean design that is enhanced by an unusual, but very useful navigation and some interesting animations for each page load. The animations are only displayed once on each page so they are subtle rather than overbearing. LUX has been tested and found compatible with all modern browsers. The theme can be customised with dozens of options, allowing you to create, your very own individual site.

Criticism: I only found one point: I can choose from 15 different Google fonts for my headlines, but only have five standard web fonts for the content – the standard web fonts don't always harmonise with the header fonts.

Trivia:

• An icon font is embedded into LUX (as are social icons). I found it amusing that the navigation arrows are called 'Carrots' and the carets are called 'Arrow-Triangles'.
• I was annoyed by the fact that I was unable to open the demo project. After 250 Beta versions of RW 8.1, I have refused to upgrade and still use RW 8.03 – sadly the new version is not backwards compatible.

*CD = Corporate Design: The standardised design elements that are associated with a company's visual appearance.
Not to be confused with:
CI = Corporate Identity or corporate image: the manner which a corporation, firm or business presents themselves to the public internally and externally.

It's sometimes difficult to allow web content to stand out from the rest of the page and still have said content look attractive. Underlines, frames, shadows, background colours, blatant flashing or jiggling sections – we've seen it all and find it just a little boring.

Popper is a new stack from STH [Shaking The Habitual] that will allow you to overlay / underlay / frame / decorate your content almost any way you please. The stack itself has just two settings Framer/Divider and Height, if Divider has been set. If Popper is set to Framer, you'll see a stacks container for the content that is to be framed, you'll also see a stacks child for the first part of your frame. Closer inspection reveals that the initial child is 200px wide and 160px high, and because your content doesn't yet have any padding, the child stack is actually top-left behind your content, so you'll need to decide exactly where to position your Popper child stacks.

You have options to set dotted (round or square) or chequered patterns. You can set the pattern height and width, the distance for the pattern repetition, the colour (of course) and the zIndex (extremely useful if you wish to layer the child stacks and create your own, more complicated patterns).

Have a text that you need to highlight? Add a frame to two corners. Have an image with a mundane background? Make it pop by overlaying a pattern. The STH Popper demo page has dozens of examples.
The simple example below was created using a single Popper stack with four child stacks around the text stack, then a Popper stack with two child stacks used as a divider.


Get creative with Popper!

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!

A few years ago, 1LD released a stack called Pure Grids. I was disappointed when it and all other 'Pure' stacks disappeared from their site because it was one of the best grid/column stacks available at the time. However, 1LD just released a grid stack that might just be even better – Layouts.

Layouts is a single stack that lets you build grids with unlimited numbers of columns, but it comes with built in stacks for Columns, Rows, Headings and Text. Layouts is flexible enough to build complete pages with relatively little effort. Gutters and row spacers are added automatically so that your layout is evenly spaced, but every setting remains fully editable. All of the elements can easily be reshuffled when need be.

Layouts creates 2 dimensional grids similar to Flexbox. This means that a grid element can not expand into the row below it as is possible with CSS Grids, but hey! CSS Grids are too possibly complicated for the majority of Weavers anyway!

A grid element – with a single mouse click – can be transformed into a Column, Row, Heading, or Text. You can, of course, add any of your favourite stacks to a Layout Column or Row; the height of each Layout element can be set up to 100% of the screen height and it goes without saying that your Layouts will reflow to fit any viewport width – there are advanced settings which allow you to define breakpoints for each device.
You'll find that Layouts is pretty amazing…

To go through each of the settings would take up more space than is available here, so if you decide that Layouts is for you, be sure to study the RW8 demo page that is included with the stack! Layouts works equally well with RW7 and there is a detailed tutorial available here.

It has been exactly four years since Yabdab's Formloom 3 was released. There were minor updates in the meantime, but now Formloom 4 has hit the market. Was a major new release necessary? Apparently it was: there are numerous new additions. Is the new plugin worth nearly twice the price? Decide for yourself:

There's a long list of new features for Formloom 4. The list isn't as long as the new features introduced with version three, but still worthy of mention.
Here's what Mike lists as being new:

So let's be honest. I never used Formloom before. I tested the beta version of V4 and was impressed. Then, after seeing Yabdab's demo page, I decided that yes, Formloom beats the trousers (pants for those on the wrong side of the pond) off FormSnap and have purchased the plugin.
Why? Because the feature list is way longer (read: 'better') and I was impressed with the new page break feature for longer forms.

Formloom is a plugin. A Formloom Helper Stack is included with the plugin which allows you to add your completed form to any stacks page. The UI, even though the forms themselves can get very complicated, is easy to understand.
More complicated forms can be divided into 'subpages' and navigation dots are automatically added so that the user can see how many pages there are. Moving backwards or forwards within a form, or accidentally refreshing the page does not delete any information that was previously entered.

If you use Formsnap, there is a special crossgrade price available for Formloom. You might find it useful to check the demo out!