Introduction

This follows our head-to-head comparison between Rapidweaver and Wordpress in relation to the installation and setup experience. In Part I of this series we saw that Wordpress was very much a pain to install for absolute newbies, failing on its 5 minutes setup promise. Rapidweaver was much easier to install and get you started.

In this second part of our comparison, we will see that Rapidweaver again outshines Wordpress when it comes to the out-of-the-box experience, that is to say what content can be put online and how easily this can be done. Wordpress fans should not despair as we will see in later installments why we chose Wordpress to publish this and other sites, without however relinquishing Rapidweaver.

Adding content to your site

Wordpress is essentially a blog editor but can be used for many other purposes. Still, once Wordpress is installed you have two basic types of pages you can add: blog posts, which will automatically appear on the front page of your site, and which may contain text and images; or pages, which will appear as sections of your website, and which may contain text and images. In both cases you can also upload files and hyperlink to them from within your content. Log on to your site administration by entering “www.yourwebsite.com/wp-login.php”, choose >”Write”, and you will have the choice between writing a blog post or a page.

Out of the box, Rapidweaver offers a lot more possibilities than Wordpress in terms of content types that can be published. You have the following choices:

Blog, which creates a blog similar to what is offered by Wordpress. It supports tags, categories, feeds, and you can also easily add a video or audio podcast to each entry.

Contact form page, which as its name suggests allows the creation of a page containing a form that allows website visitors to contact you easily by sending you an email from within your site.

File sharing page, which creates a page listing all types of documents that you wish to make available for download: photos, documents, movies, etc.

HTML page creates a page whose content must be edited using the HTML language. Very powerful for the hand coders, although the built-in text editor is not very advanced.

iFrame page allows you to display the content of another webpage within your own page.

Movie album. This is one of the features that sets RapidWeaver apart from Wordpress: the ability to create an album of movies out-of-the-box. This page type only allows you to include your own movies or movies you have downloaded, and the movie type must be supported by Quicktime. It does not allow for example to embed Youtube videos. To do that you would need to paste the embed code found on Youtube pages in a Styled or HTML page.

Offsite page is a placeholder page that will automatically redirect the user to another url address, be it on your site or another site.

Photo album. Like in a Movie album page, you can easily and quickly create a gallery of photos or a slideshow. This is a very powerful feature, and now works with Flickr: you can either add pictures which you have saved on your computer or display photos which are hosted on Flickr. This is a great feature as it reduces significantly the size of the size files on your server and your computer.

Quicktime page styles are a variation of the Movie album style. You can add a single movie on a page, and choose how you want to display the movie, such as in kiosk mode. Again the movie files must be of a type supported by Quicktime.

Styled text pages allow you to edit content using a rich text editor similar to Wordpress’ visual editor.

RapidWeaver page styles are shown in the image below:

RapidWeaver wins this round

RapidWeaver has many more page styles out-of-the-box than Wordpress. It allows you to add picture galleries, slideshows and movies easily and in a few clicks, something which is not possible under Wordpress without additional plugins. The comparison is a little unfair given that Wordpress’ focus is mainly on blog editing, whereas RapidWeaver presents itself as a full website editor.

Text editing functions

Editing text with Wordpress By default, Wordpress’ visual editor will come up, which allows you to edit and format text using functions that are familiar to all users of text editors. It is also relatively easy to add images that you can either upload or link to. It is not a fully “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” editor, as your formatting will not be fully respected when publishing your content. The results can actually be quite different, as shown in the two images below.

The above image shows the text formatted using Wordpress’ visual editor. The published version is starkly different, as shown below. The result is actually better than shown on the image, as we reduced the image size to fit on this page.

This is not the only limitation of the visual editor. There is no option to change the text’s color or font style. In addition, although there has been progress on that front recently, the visual editor sometimes disappears and does not play nice with all browsers. Even when using the >”Code” view by clicking on the tab next to “Visual”, the editor has a tendency to break codes that you have copied and pasted from other sites, such as the very popular “embed” function on Youtube. Users who find this limitation annoying can easily turn off the visual editor mode. To do this, click on the >”Users” tab, select >”Your profile” and deselect the >”Use the visual editor when writing” option, as shown below. You will then be able to edit and format your content using slightly less intuitive but more robust functions. This standard editor is shown in the second picture below.

We tend to prefer the standard editor, as it allows to add html formatting code without problems. These limitations are not very serious when compared to Wordpress’ main advantage: you do not need to be at your computer to edit and add content. As everything happens online, you can easily manage your website from any computer. Besides, for those who absolutely want to keep a copy of their content on their computer, there are a number of software programs that allow the creation and editing of content on your computer and to synchronize it with your website. Ecto and Journler are among them. Finally, Wordpress also allows posting of content by email. This is not easy to set up, but once you are done this is a very nifty feature indeed.

Text editing with RapidWeaver. In Styled Text or Blog pages, RapidWeaver gives you much more formatting options than Wordpress. You can easily change the text’s font, size, style and color. This is much more powerful, but it still fails to provide a true “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” experience, as shown in the images below.

The above shows the text editor window. Below is the result in preview mode. The result is actually better than shown on the image, as we reduced the image size to fit on this page.

Rapidweaver wins again

Both software work well as text editors but fail to provide a true WYSIWYG experience. RapidWeaver is marginally better as it offers more control on the format.

Conclusion

Out-of-the-box, RapidWeaver offers more choice in terms of publishable content: movies, podcasts, picture galleries and slideshows can be added in a snap. Wordpress’ main strength is that it allows online editing and posting by email. It however fails to offer popular features such as video and picture galleries. Worse, the default visual editor tends to break the embed code when copied from Youtube.

RapidWeaver’s dominance outlines the different philosophies of the two software. We will see in later installments of this comparison that thanks to add-ons, Wordpress gains a lot of the functionalities offered by RapidWeaver, and that the latter catches up with some of the better aspects of Wordpress. Stay tuned for more.

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