RapidWeaver vs Wordpress

Now that I've finally settled on a layout for this new site (after toying with it for a few weeks), I am going to polish it up so I can offer the basic design as a free Wordpress template. Trust me, it needs some serious polishing. But I think it's almost there. I've got to know Wordpress pretty well during the exercise of designing 'View from the Dock'. I'll share some of what I learned in Wordpress in future posts. Next, I'm going to migrate this design to RapidWeaver. The RW site will be a little different, because I want to offer it up with user-controlled colors and such.

I've been using Wordpress and RapidWeaver for about the same amount of time. In future posts, I'm going to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of each. In the end, I hope to provide a good overview of the capabilities of each platform. I can say that, while I really love the countless ways I can modify and tweak a Wordpress theme (this site began life as the Kubrick Default theme that we all start out with when installing WP), I miss the simplicity and style that RapidWeaver offers. However, RapidWeaver isn't quite as extensible or as easy to bend to your will. Which is the better choice? The answer, of course, depends on your needs. Certainly these two platforms are not the same animal, but they do offer roughly the same capabilities — I know that some might argue that WP is a blogging platform while RW is a web design tool that includes the ability to add blogs ... While this is true, I've found that both packages can, more or less, do the same thing. More to come on this. I've spent pretty much this entire weekend on this site design, so I'm going to call it a night and get away from the mac for a while.

Troy Kitch @troykitch