In the past there have been heated discussions as to which stack is the best to display multiple business locations. Well I'm about to pour oil on the fire, because I might just have the answer for you. The new Locator stack from S4S.

Your client runs a chain of Restaurants with branches in every shopping centre in town ('mall', if you live across the pond), plus a couple of select locations. With Locator, site visitors will not only be able to see which branch of the restaurant is closest to his adobe, but also call up directions and view the restaurant in Street View for optical identification.
All your visitor needs to do is enter his ZIP code into the (optional) search field and submit. If your server has SSL certification, geo location can be automated!

A seemingly unlimited number of locations can be added to Locator via Google Earth KML files, XML files, or, if you've previously added locations to WordPress, or similar, via JSON import.

The simplest method is, of course the Google Earth solution. You will, however, need to download the Google Earth app first. The online version doesn't export the .klm data required by Locator.

Open up Google Earth; add a folder for your locations; drop in place pins and save them to your location folder; set a description for each location. Add further details, such as contact information and opening times. Once you've added all of your locations save the whole folder as a KML file and either drag the file into your RapidWeaver project resources, or upload it to your server.

In your Locator stack, you can now link to the .kml file, switch to preview and call up all of the locations you've added. As simple as that!


If you'd prefer to have a more easily editable location list, then an XML file is recommended. You can download examples of all file formats from the product page to see which best suits your purposes.

Stack settings
General Settings
Google API key – Will has Kindly left his API key in the stacks so that the demo data functions.
You should, however, visit the Google Developer's site and acquire your own key. It's a painless process.
Data File Type – Google Earth KML, JSON, Sample Data, XML
Set Link

Form Settings
Formatting for the location search

Map Options
Length Units
Map Type
Distance Alert – (set to -1 to deactivate)
Height
Location Limit
Zoom – Base map magnification
Standard Google Maps options (10 settings)
Start Map Open
Default Location Latitude/Longitude
StreetView Button
Custom Marker

Locator List Settings
List Position, plus colour formatting

Locator Localisations
Translations for non-English websites.

Programming a store locator would normally be a very expensive undertaking. Locator not only simplifies the task, but makes it affordable.
And if you hurry, the S4S page still has a 50% Black Friday price reduction. That's a helluva-lotta-stack for a small price.

There must be three dozen media players available for RapidWeaver in combination with Stacks. RWExtras just released Multi Player. If you're quick, you can grab it at half price now!

And yet another media player stack!
However, this single stack supports multiple media sources including self-hosted MP3 / MP4 files, YouTube and Vimeo content. It's basically four stacks in one.
Multi Player is remarkably quick and easy to get setup, even if you're someone who's never done much work with embedded audio or video in websites before now. Only the most-essential options are shown to you in edit mode.
The finished player has an ultra-modern and minimalist interface, fully responsive and is compatible with all newer web browsers.

I have to admit that Ninja News hasn't had the time to test Multi Player!

Most Black Friday Sales continue until today, so if you need a simple contact form, you can still grab Compact Form from RWEXtras. It's available for half price until the end of the day.

Compact Form is a lightweight contact form that is reduced to a bare minimum and will fit into almost any space – top-bar, side-bar, footer, or extra content zone.
Compact Form is restricted to a total of six fields, so once you have requested a visitor's name, email address, subject and message, you have two fields available to collect any extra details you might need (address and phone number, perhaps; or device and OS…).

Something that I personally like about Compact Form is the fact that the submit button doesn't appear until all of the compulsory fields have data centred into them. So there is no submit-and-read-the-error-message routine – you can't submit the form until you've answered the questions!

Other than the fields to be submitted, you will find options to set the text and the border colours, the send button colours and the send button text colour. Other formatting is determined by the site styles.

Compact Form uses a highly-effective 'honey pot' anti-spam system; so your form is protected against spambots without the annoyance of Captcha. The Compact Form can submit to multiple email addresses.
Compact Form requires php and once submitted a success page is automatically generated.
The ideal replacement for the built in RW contact form for use on stacks pages and in confined spaces.

This one nearly got by unnoticed: If you purchased ScrollPane from Tsooj Media, you'll be pleased to hear that an updated version is now available on the Stacks4Stacks page.

After chatting with Will Woodgate, I know that he was reluctant to update ScrollPane, and for a week, or two, ScrollPane was even repurposed. However, Will has taken the existing customer base into consideration and – rather than hanging existing users out to dry – has decided to release an update after all.

For those of you that don't know ScrollPane, here's a rundown:

ScrollPane is a stack that allows you to alter the appearance of stacks that have content overflow and customise the scrollbar.
Now I personally hate it when my mouse cursor, or the page scrollbar are hi-jacked and suddenly appear in customised form on a website. And generally speaking, a customised scrollbar is frowned upon. However, there's a difference between hi-jacking the webpage scrollbar and the scrollbars of stacks that have overflow. I'm not against the latter and actually approve of ScrollPane.

ScrollPane allows you to customise overflowing containers to match the general appearance of your page, i.e. use the site's colour scheme and flat appearance, and/or match the scroll arrows to the [Mac] OS.

ScrollPane has been updated to take advantage of the Stacks 3 options and the settings panel has been tidied up. It's now a much neater stack than before.

Stack settings

General Settings
Gutter Margin – Amount of space (px) between the content and the scrollbar
Scroll Speed – Distance the pane travels (px) when arrow keys, or scroll wheel are used
Click Speed – Distance the pane travels (px) when the scroll arrows, or scroll pane is clicked
Pane Height – Total height of the ScrollPanel
Transparent Pane – active by default. When deactivated the ScrollPanel Background Colour can be set

Arrow Settings
Show Arrows – Default
Normal Arrow – Arrow Opacity between 1 and 61
Hover Arrow – Arrow Opacity between 1 and 61
Scroll On Arrow Hover
OS Style Arrow Position – both arrows below the scroll panel
Automatically Reinitialise – Reinitialise the stack every n milliseconds to compensate for mobile screen rotation, or false image size definition

Track & Drag Settings
Hide Track
Track Colour
Automatic Drag Height
[Manual] Drag Height – px
Drag [Colour] Normal
Drag [Colour] Hovered
Radius – px

Advanced Settings
Fade In ScrollPane
Fade In Delay – ms

With so many options for its configuration, ScrollPane can be matched to any webpage and makes truncated text attractive.

A stack that adds a ToDo list to your page and can cross off the elements that you've already eliminated. Can RapidWeaver do this? Well yes, of course it can. It can now, at least. RWExtras just released TaskList and if you hurry, you can grab it as a Black Friday promotion.

Let's say you have recipes online and you'd like your visitors to be able to cross off the ingredients that they already have and have the browser remember them. Or on your very private homepage, you'd like a list of 'Things To Do' before you publish an RW project. TaskList is an ingenious little stack even supports subheadings so that you can divide your recipe into Meat Dish, Sauce and Trimmings.
The possibilities are almost endless…

TaskList has extensive Style settings for the list itself and even includes options for the Checked Items such as Bold, Italic, Strikethrough, Opacity, Background Colour and Text Colour.

A ToDo List sounds so simple, yet it can be so configurable. Grab TaskList as part of RWExtra's Black Friday Promotion now!