As a semi-pro Weaver, you'll already know which image effects can be achieved with CSS filters. Changes such as colour intensity, hover effects and much more are possible. As a non-coder, you may have wondered how some of these many effects are achieved.

JW's Filters Stack removes the secrets from said CSS effects and not only lets you easily choose from over 40 image effects, but also apply the effects to complete layout elements – hover effects included.
With Filters you can standardise all of the images on your web page by applying the same filter to every image; you have complete control over blur, brightness hue, etc. and you can apply hover effects that, for example, turn a black and white or sepia image into a full colour image.

Filters is delivered with 2 stacks. Filter Presets with (if I counted correctly) 41 different filter effects, and Filter Pro which allows you to build your own effects and to apply them to a 'Scope' i.e. to Images, Class, All, Custom Selector.
The effects possible with Filter Pro are: Greyscale, Sepia, Brightness, Contrast, Saturate, Invert, Hue, Opacity, Blur, Blend Mode, Duotone and Hover effects. Any or all of these effects can be combined with each other.

Filters will easily make your website more interesting and can draw attention to specific page elements. Total CMS users will be interested to know that Filters is fully compatible and can easily change whole pages of images.
The only downside: You won't be able to fully appreciate Joe's demo project without first investing in his Wallpaper and Target stacks.

When used to saying 'manipulate', 'menupilate' is a bit of a mouthful, but Menupilator is the name the latest stack from Marathia's stacks. Jeroen has a thing for allowing you to manipulate your site's navigation and Menupilator is the fourth of his stacks that can alter menu functions.

Annoying fact: Your website's 'Home' button will usually reload your home page if clicked when you are already on the home page.The same will happen if you click on the link of any page that you are already on. Confusing, or what? Menupilator can deactivate the 'Home' link and any other link on your site to avoid confusion.
Does your client want you to add a new page to an already bursting navigation bar? You could shorten the page titles in the page settings to make room for another menu item, but this might damage SEO results. You could, however, shorten the page titles using Menupilator and leave the SEO results intact (I just altered a page title from "Wir über uns" to "About Us" with three mouse clicks).

If you need to highlight a specific menu item e.g. so that a visitor immediately sees how to contact you, Menupilator can quickly do the job. Menupilator can also trigger a lightbox instead of opening a new page. It could also trigger a dropdown that offers different language versions of your site.

Here's a list of everything the new stack can do. Menupilator comes in handy when you want to:

• put extra emphasis on one ore more menu items (by changing their style and/or color)
• disable a menu item (e.g. to turn it into a placeholder for submenu items)
• make a menu item do something that cannot be defined by RapidWeaver (trigger a lightbox, a shopping cart etc.)
• link a menu item to the corresponding page in another language
• make a menu item behave differently on one (or some) page(s) only
• remove a menu item on one (or some) page(s) only
• make a more colourful menu

Note: Menupilator combines the functionality of the NoLink, the NoCurrent and the Lang­Menu stacks from Marathia's stacks, but adds functionality not in included with any of of those stacks.

Damn, I recently purchased a stack specifically to alter a menu's function. If only Menupilator had been around then, it's much more flexible.

Until very recently, applying a background image to a page section involved either a large sized pixel image, or some relatively complicated setup. Enter 1LD (otherwise known as One Little Designer) who want to make the addition of SVG background images simpler with Image Sector.

Image Sector allows you to create new, shapable background images for RapidWeaver like seldom before. And without the hassle.
SVG Scalable Vector Graphics. Images that can be incredibly tiny, but can scale up (or down) to any size without losing their crisp edges.

For some time now, we have had the possibility of adding SVG images to RapidWeaver and nowadays even MS browsers are able to display said images.
Obviously SVG is ideal for use as section masks or section dividers and 1LD resolves the problem that those little grey cells may have when trying to work out how to implement said masks.
What do we need? Image Sector and some page sections…
The simplest transitions (obviously) are those that divide a page horizontally.

Image Sector's delivers ten different shapes by default, plus the option to add your own custom shape. The latter, of course involves the use of Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, or the included free shape tool. With just a few mouse clicks, you can divide your page just as you wish. The added advantage is that each of the SVG masks that you use can be used as an image frame. Your text floats over a masked image and looks incredible!

Image Sector delivers more than 30 pre-designed presets, plus over 600 icon paths. With the added advantage that you can design your own masks anything is possible!

And – if you're stuck for an SVG and the image that you have in mind is too complicated, you can also use an image (ideally a png) to mask your section. If you use the appropriate colour combination, your content may even run into and over the image and still look good.

To see the full capabilities of Image Sector, please visit the demo page, your sections will never look the same again!

Last week Weavium released a set of stacks under the title 'Fluid' On the webpage there are two interesting statements 'The build tool that will change RapidWeaver forever' AND 'If you can dream it, you can achieve it, with Fluid'. I also read somewhere that there's a learning curve involved.

The internet is no longer a static entity. With the abundance of information to be displayed in the confined space of a web page, it makes sense to hide some details until the user really needs it. Aside from that, moving elements can make a page more interesting. The Fluid demo page is extremely interesting with elements that move when clicked and slide into view when the page is scrolled — the page simply begs for your attention.
But Fluid isn't simply about motion, it allows you, as the demo page shows, to build complete web pages that include floating menus and most of the page content you need.
Using the Fluid Suite, you can add Buttons, Icons, Images and Text in addition to the default Fluid stack the Fluid Container, State Manager and Trigger.

The main Fluid stack supplies the JS necessary for any transitions whilst the Fluid Container will accommodate any of the other stacks. The Trigger stack defines when/how a transition should take place and the State Manager allows you to define the transition.
Just about any imaginable state is possible; from simply changing an element's colour upon hover, over opacity, rotation, zoom or positioning etc. on hover, click or page movement. There are many more transitions (z-Index, Object Size etc.) available.

So back to the 'learning curve'. After viewing the initial demo project with 11 pages of examples, I felt a little daunted. I contacted Skyler and he supplied a project with five pages that made things a whole lot more understandable!

Three things that you'll need to remember before you commit to Fluid:
Fluid is an amazing product that will allow you to build RW pages that you never imagined before.
Fluid has a fairly steep learning curve that is aided by Skyler's new demo project.
Less is more! You might want to let rip and animate everything on you newest RW pages. But don't overdo it!
Too much movement eventually distracts from your content, in addition to which the JS necessary to move all of your page elements can quickly become quite large.
Your project size might not matter to users in areas with good internet accessibility, but always remember that the JS necessary for any animation adds to the project size and your product might be viewed on a mobile phone or in other areas where every Kb costs your visitor valuable $.

Here at Ninja News, we don't write about updated add-ons. If we did, this space would be overpopulated and the monthly newsletter would be fifteen pages long.
But for every rule there's an exception. When a plugin is completely rewritten and prances around with swelled chest, proclaiming 'I'm New', we have to sit up and take notice.

And JW's updated Target is new. Having been rewritten from the ground up, it's much simpler to use, it's easier to understand and it offers completely new options.

The old Target stack was sometimes a little difficult to use. The options weren't always 100% understandable and you could sometimes play around for… well, let's say longer than necessary to get your positioning just right. With Target's new options, experimentation is a thing of the past, your main concerns are now limited to Margins and Padding!

As before, Target offers options to pin its content to the top, or to the bottom of the page, or relative to its parent stack etc, but it now comes with an additional container for Background content. The advantage? Well, for example, there are a couple of third party menu stacks that are unable to have a logo positioned within them.
Drop the menu stack into a Target background container, however, and logos become child's play.
But that's just one option. Using the background stack, you get five default options for the positioning, plus an option to customise your position and as before, you can also rotate your content.

If you already purchased Target, no matter if it was last week or at some point in 2012, the update is completely free. If you didn't purchase Target yet, you might want to give it some serious consideration…