RapidWeaver 5 Released

This past week RealMac software touted a major upgrade to RapidWeaver, their template driven website design software (Mac only). I love RapidWeaver and used it to design this website as well as all my course websites.

The big question for some is: Should I upgrade to version 5? In general my answer is "No." However, in some cases there are likely people who do want to upgrade right away. There are a few current problems with RapidWeaver 5: (1) the upgrade is $39, (2) there aren't a lot of obvious beneficial features, and (3) the various third-party plugins, themes, and stacks haven't all updated themselves to be version 5 compliant. In addition, version 5 is demonstrating a fair number of bugs (depending on your specific computer set up and plugins).

The second question is: Should I ever upgrade to version 5? In general my answer is "Yes." I'd suggest waiting until the various bugs have been squashed, and all third-party add-ons have been updated to work with the new version. In addition, the current version has paltry documentation, but proper documentation should come along in the next month or two. Perhaps around March or April would be a good time to update.

RapidWeaver 5 mainly has a lot of under the hood improvements that end-users won't benefit from until third-party add-ons take full advantage of them. So further down the road upgrading (and thus paying $39) may be worth it.

I think there may be an exception to the "wait to upgrade" approach. If your current version of RapidWeaver is unstable (i.e. it crashes a lot) then an upgrade may help. In my initial testing RapidWeaver 5 is a lot more stable than version 4. However, if you really have an unstable setup you'd want to first check that the problem doesn't lie elsewhere—typically old add-ons that are not at their most recent version or that have been discontinued.

All in all, version 5 is a bit of a disappointment for several reasons. However, I'm fairly confident that by the time spring rolls around we'll start to see the practical benefits of this change.