Realmac Software on Wednesday released RapidWeaver 5, a major upgrade to its visual and extensible Website creation and blogging app for the Mac.
RapidWeaver sits comfortably in the space between drag-and-drop Website creation, like Apple’s iWeb, and everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink suites like Adobe’s Dreamweaver. While it is based around themed Website templates and provides no direct access to your site’s code, you can customize many behavioral aspects of your sites, install a wide variety of officially supported add-ons and themes, and add things like reusable text snippets and Website traffic analytics.
In development for a year, RapidWeaver 5 gained a number of big new features, not the least of which is a dedicated new Site Resources manager. If you provide downloadable files like PDFs and ZIPs for your visitors, you can now manage them all from a new section in RapidWeaver’s sidebar. This means files are no longer segregated to individual pages, and RapidWeaver can keep track of changes you make on your Mac, such as renaming a file.
A new sitemap plugin lets you easily create a map of your site for visitors, and RapidWeaver can now automatically generate an XML sitemap that gets submitted to search engines when you publish your sites. Managing your sites is now easier as well, as a new FTP Bookmarks manager makes it easy to add or reuse sites for publishing.
