Guest Post from Will Woodgate

There has been a major update to the ever-popular Player stack. Player remains the single-most sophisticated audio and video player available for Stacks. Nothing else compares. If you are serious about getting audio or video content into your website professionally, then this is absolutely the stack you need for the job! Its light codebase, attractive styling and broad feature set make it a must-have. Superbly engineered and the perfect stack to broadcast yourself with! Watch the tutorial video and download your free demo version today.

Many online stores have a useful feature – if you hover over an image of the article you're viewing, the image will enlarge underneath your mouse so that you can view details.
Image Zoom from RWextras used to do exactly that, however, it disappeared for a while. Now it's back – freshly updated and free of charge!

Zoomy is the new name for a simple stack that enables an attractive magnification effect for RapidWeaver images. Magnification can take place on mouseover, grab, or click. There are also a couple of other settings built in to change aspects such as the zoom amount, animation speed and mouse cursor.

Zoomy will work either with images you drag and drop into RapidWeaver or images stored in a warehouse location. Compatibility is offered with all major web browsers. And Zoomy is responsive.

Stack settings.
Image source allows you to add either Dragged and Dropped Images, or Warehoused Images.
Mouse Cursor gives you the option of seven different cursor styles.
Zoom Trigger has the options Click, Grab, Mousover, or Toggle – Grab is my favourite.
Duration sets the fadeout time once the cursor leaves the image.
Magnification is a percentage of the original size for the enlargement.

Looking for further settings? You'll be hard pressed to find any, the above are all that's needed.

Zoomy is a neat little stack that does exactly as it says on the tin and has the advantage of being both responsive and free.

Pro Gallery, one of Stacks4Stacks' most popular products, has just been updated to version 2. One of the performance saving enhancements is lazy loading, which results in much larger galleries being feasible. If you have a large portfolio of images, or videos, you may wish to take a closer look…

Will's demo gallery contains 117 images and is close to 400MB in size. Quite a risky and time consuming undertaking in most cases, however, with ProGallery a gallery of this magnitude is not only possible, it's also quite simple to set up.
With lazy loading/progressive loading, the image, or video that is currently requested is called from the server on demand, thus preserving bandwidth.

The ProGallery lightbox itself has been completely rebuilt and the clutter has been removed. The controls and the titles are no longer within the displayed image, but are placed outside of it, thus allowing the viewer to focus on the image itself. Keyboard navigation has been implemented, as has swipe actions on mobile devices. In addition to an image title, a caption text can now be added.

Stack settings.

Once you've dragged a ProGallery stack to your page and clicked the + button to add a child stack, you'll see that there are now four options to add images to your Gallery.

Single Image is the simplest solution. The settings panel displays three image wells for local, or warehoused images. Thumbnail, Large Lightbox Image and High Resolution Lightbox Image. Below these options you can add both an Image Title and an Image Caption. You will then see Alternative Link: Set Link button?
The Lightbox can be disabled. Setting a link to the thumbnail then gives you the option of linking to external pages. These pages could be product pages, or further galley pages.

Single Video is similar to Single Image. The thumbnail can be a local or a warehoused image. The Video Link will accept any video that can be embedded within a page. ProGallery will automatically discern the video format. Once more, both a Title and a Caption may be added.

Directory Of Images. One means of simplifying building a large gallery of images, is to upload the images, high-res images and thumbnails (with _thumb, or @2 appended to the name) to a server and add a .php-relative path to the Directory Path in the settings panel (html will not functions here). Then set the options Use Thumbnails and/or Use Retina Images accordingly. Your index page must then be set to .php instead of .html
ProGallery will then automatically load your images into a gallery.

CSV File. As before, ProGallery will accept a CSV file as a gallery source. The file format has now been extended to include Retina Images and Captions.

The ProGallery main stack settings are too numerous to list here, but you can take full control of your gallery appearance. The settings include Gallery ID (you may have more than one gallery on a page) Grid Type, Special effects (only for modern browsers), Transition Speed and multitudinous settings for the Lightbox.

It remains to be said that – apart from the thumbnails – there are three further options to trigger the ProGallery Lightbox. You may use a link, or a button to open the lightbox, you may do the same to open a specific image from the gallery, and you can trigger a specific slide on page load. These options are all explained in detail on the product page.

ProGallery, then, has now advanced from being one of the best gallery stacks available for RapidWeaver to one of the very best.The magnitude of possibilities make it a pleasure to set up and its reliability when building large galleries makes it second to none.

HotSpots from Stacks4Stacks has been around for a while now – since 2014 to be precise. At that time, I didn't review HotSpots myself, but published a guest post from Will Woodgate. Will has just given the stack a spring clean and released it as version 3. It has been greatly improved over previous versions.

HotSpots began life as a free stack. The free version is still available, but if you're going to use hot spots more than once, you'll find the pro version much easier to use!

What are hotspots, I hear you ask. Hotspots are active areas positioned over an image. They can be activated to display information, when the mouse hovers over them, or they can contain an external link that is activated on mouse click. The external link may, of course, be a lightbox or a gallery that opens on the same page.
A word of warning – If you have a previous version of HotSpots installed, uninstall it before you install the new version to avoid conflicts.

Stack Settings.
The stack settings have been greatly simplified since the original version – in part, of course, due to the release of Stacks3.
When you drop HotSpots onto a Stacks page, you'll see a container with an 'add child' + button.
I recommend that you first add an image to the image well in the settings panel. The image may be local, or warehoused.

Once you have an image loaded, you can begin to add your hotspots by clicking the + button.
The main stack's settings will allow you to set up the general appearance of the hotspots. The very first setting is Edit Highlight. This is the highlight colour of the hotspot that you are currently editing – it makes it more obvious in edit mode, which of your 50 spots is currently active.
Lightbox – when activated, will enable the following lightbox settings:
Gallery adds next and previous arrows to the lightbox, enabling users to move to the next, or previous image.
Content Type is set to Auto[detect] by default. The options are AJAX, iFrame, Images, Inline, or Video. The lightbox function is demonstrated on the HotSpots product page.
Effect offers seven options for the image changes.
Next follow the colour options for the Window Shade, Title Fill and Title text.
Toggle will allow your visitor to toggle the annotations on and off to view the main image undisturbed.
Toggle Button and Toggle Fill let you set the colours for said toggle. The instruction text may be freely defined.
Tooltips – the hotspot info that is displayed on hover – may be deactivated.
The hotspots may display an icon which may be an image, or a font awesome icon. Place Icon Bottom Centre does just as it says.
The next eight settings are for the tooltip appearance.
Then finally, you will find the settings for the HotsSpot Global Styling and Mouse Cursor.

Once you have activated your first hotspot, you can click it (a great advantage over previous versions) and check the settings panel again.
The first settings are for the positioning, in percent, from the Left and from the Top of the image.
Then you have the Width, the Height and the Tooltip Position, the HotSpot Link settings, the Title Text and the Content Or Icon.
These settings are all best made in preview mode.

Each of the hotspots can be set to Custom Settings – an override that allows you to set the Background Fill, Borders and the Content settings individually for each HotSpot.

HotSpotsPro 3 is a great improvement over previous versions and well worth taking a look at.

The rules that govern SEO state that a social presence will heighten your rating on the search engines. As such, most businesses have a facebook page. I hate Facebook, but I have a page all the same. Some time ago, RWtuts introduced a Facebook stack for RapidWeaver. Marvin just sent me a copy of the new version – Facebook Pages 2. I just took a look at it and I think a lot of you will like it.

Facebook Pages displays a live facebook page on your RapidWeaver Stacks page, which is great because instead of having to search for your facebook page, your visitor can see your latest posts directly on your homepage without getting distracted by all the cute kittens and clever dog posts. And, he/she can like your page directly from the homepage and/or access the Facebook page directly by clicking the link provided.

I know that a lot of clients are going to like Facebook Pages and the great thing is – it's simple to set up; there are only a few settings, but some of great options. And it updates instantaneously.


Stack settings.
The only setting that you need is the name of your facebook page. Finished.
However, you do have some options. You might, for instance, wish to set the Width, Height and Alignment of the stack. A word of warning – don't set the width wider than the container it is in, Facebook Pages is not fully responsive and it can overflow.
Enable Small Header will reduce the height of the page header (active in the screenshot above).
Hide/Cover Header image deactivates the header image and leaves just the page logo visible.
Hide Call To Action Button will hide a CTA button, if you have on your fb page.
Show Facepiles will activate/deactivate the images of those that have liked your page.
Finally, you can decide which page tabs you would like visible within the stack – Timeline, Messages, or Events, or different combinations of each.

Facebook Pages will only display, well, facebook pages. It will not display personal pages or timelines, so if you want your visitors to see your cute cat, or how intelligent your goldfish is, you'll need to create a page to do so.
I can see this stack becoming very popular – even without those cute pets.