We've all read about the advantages of A/B testing. Upload a landing page with a call to action and a week later swap it out for a different page; then check your statistics to see which was more successful. But be honest; put your hands up, those of you that have actually tired it. It's just too arduous. Well, now it isn't!

ABSplit, from Yuzool themes, is a new stack that randomly serves up two alternate versions of a page, or parts of a page. If you wish to test two different CTAs, just drop them into the ABSplit stack sections and publish. If you wish to test two completely different page design, construct one page inside the A section and the alternate page inside the B section.
When your page is published and viewed online, an alternate version will be randomly displayed each time your landing page is loaded.

ABSplit has just a single setting in the stacks panel – Hide Tests – Show Both (default), Hide B Content, Hide A content. Hide Tests can hide either of your content areas in edit mode.

Now go forth and make your A/B testing work for you.

Back in February, 2015, I compared five sets of stacks that allowed time-based publishing with RapidWeaver. One of the best of those stacks was Advanced Publisher from Tsooj Media. Advanced Publisher is now even better than before. It has been rewritten and improved by Will Woodgate and has been housed within the S4S stables.

You've prepared an article that you don't wish to appear until August 25th, or you have a special promotion that is only available between September and November and only during business hours. Or maybe you have student's examination results, or study material that should only be available to a specific student, or group of students…

Advanced Publisher from Stacks4Stacks is a suite of five PHP based stacks which will allow you to publish time sensitive content at specific times, or when a URL query is fulfilled.
Because AP is PHP based your content will never be loaded unnecessarily. It will never appear within your code until it is requested. This means that advanced users and hackers can not view your unpublished content until the defined time range has been reached, or the specific URL query has been requested.
The inclusion of the AP Secret stack gives you the option of supplying unique content to unique visitors. You can also create your own tabbed content using AP Secret, to ensure that your pages load faster.

Stack settings

A single Advanced Publisher Base stack must be present on the page containing your AP content, preferably above the other AP stacks. The AP Base stack allows you to set the time zone that your scheduled data will appear in. The time zone can be set to 'Webserver', 'Predefined' or 'Custom'. Predefined gives you a choice of locations from each time zone around the world – including the half and quarter hour steps of some locations. If you choose custom, you can enter the zone manually, e.g. Asia/Kathmandu.

The AP Base Stack can refresh the pages content every n minutes and also has options to display or hide the preview in RapidWeaver and to display the publishing details so that there will be no surprises if you'd forgotten that a previous promotion, or article was on your page. It's interesting to note that the publishing details also include the server's PHP version.

The AP Days Stack is for stacks that you wish to be displayed on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; Mondays to Fridays, or Fridays to Mondays, for instance. The settings panel contains checkboxes for the days of the week that content is to be published on.

AP Days also has a choice of settings to publish content on Even Days, Odd Days, the First Day of the Month, Last Day of the Month, Month Days (with settings for up to four separate days), Particular Month Days (with settings for the range of days) and, as with all of the Advanced Publisher Content stacks, an option to display alternative content outside of the publishing dates.

The AP Time Stack supplies the options for your publishing timeframe. This can be set to
Full Date. Full Date can be set to Display: Not Until (Start Date), Between and Only Before, With a Date and Time Range for each of those settings.
Repeatable Date has the same settings.
Hours and Minutes also has the above settings, but is restricted to a Time Range
Months also shares the above settings, but is restricted to months.

The AP Weeks Stack will allow you to publish content during different weeks. You may choose Odd Weeks, Even Weeks, Week(s) with options for up to four different weeks, Weeks (Not Until), Weeks (Between) and Weeks (Not Before).

The AP Secret Stack will allow you to publish stacks that are only accessible when a URL query is fulfilled. This means that you may either add a specific link to your page to display your hidden content, or you could give your user a page link to access specific content within your page.
The stack settings allow you to define a Secret Key and a Secret Value. Only when both are contained within the URL e.g. ["?secret_key=secret_value"], will your content be revealed.

Note: AP stacks can be nested to further refine your publishing dates. Hence, if you wish your content to appear during weeks 32 and 33, but only between the hours of 9–5, you can carefully nest your AP stacks to fulfil this wish.

Advanced Publisher 4 has been greatly improved over the previous version. Everything that was missing in version 3 has now been added. As Will himself says: It's like having a personal assistant for your website!

Jeroen at Marathia's stacks can always be relied upon to produce interesting stacks. His latest product, ScrollShow is a flexible CTA stack that can load with your page, or be set to appear when your visitor scrolls the page.

Why do I say flexible? Because ScrollShow has a number of options to display/position the stack – we'll get to that shortly; you get to decide exactly when it is displayed and you can drop almost anything into it that you want.

Example: You want to display a CTA when your visitor has scrolled 500px down the page. With a teaser and a button to link to a special offer. Or you want to display a menu bar at the bottom of the page (DeFliGra's MenuList is ideal for this) when your TopBar has been scrolled out of view – and have the menu disappear again, when the page is scrolled back up.

The CTA above is set to display once the page is scrolled down 400px, but to disappear again when the page has been scrolled down a further 400px. It can be clicked away and won't appear again until the page is refreshed. No page content is permanently hidden from view.

Stack settings.

Action. The options are Show, or Hide.
Show/Hide… The options are When Scrolling Down At Least… When Scrolling Down Between… and Always.
Scroll Position displays the pixel values for the above options.
When Scrolling Up gives the options Do Nothing, Hide When Shown and Show When Hidden.
Transition Speed. Can be set between 0 and 1000 milliseconds.
Position. Allows nine different positions on the page – combinations of top, bottom, left, right, or centre.
Distance From. Pixel distance from the edge of the page.
Width. Popup width in percent. It is also possible to set both a Minimum and a Maximum width in px.

Content Settings
Custom Font Size. Font Family has three options – Theme Default, Web Safe Font, or Custom.
Custom Text Colour. Custom Link Colour. Custom Link Underlining. Custom Heading Size. Custom Heading Colour.

There are further options to activate a Close Button, three options for the Close Icon, Icon Size and Icon Colours for Static, Hover and Active.
The Icon Position can be set to the Left, or The Right of the open Popup.

You can look forward to seeing ScrollShow on this page in the near future!

1LD just released a neat and very useful popup stack with a great set of actions. Notify will present anything you wish to drop inside it, from cookie notices to information boxes and warnings.

EU law stipulates that a warning must be presented, when cookies are present on a site. These notices are now generally ignored and are rarely clicked away, or accepted unless they hide page content. So what about a cookie message that loads with the page and disappears after n seconds?

Stack settings.
Notice consists of two stacks. Notice and Notice Trigger. Notice trigger allows you to drop in a stack that will trigger notice. Its only setting is Connected ID. set the ID of your Notice stack (you might want more than one, right?).

Show Type. The first thing that Notice wants to know, is how it should be triggered. The options are Open On Start, Timer, On Scroll and On Notice Trigger only.
I searched in vain for a setting to determine the scroll distance before Notice opens on scroll. I'm sure this option would be much appreciated. As it stands, Notice opens up immediately, as soon as the page is scrolled any distance.

Show Animation. You have a choice of 42 animations to blend in your Notice Stack.
Hide Type has two options: Hide Manually, or Timer. Hide Animations has the same options as Show Animation.
Content Type is set to Text/Icon by default. It can be set to Stacks. Fill Mode may be set to Fill, Pixel Width, or Percentage Width.
The Z-Index is set to 999999 by default.

Position Vert: may be set to Top, Centre, or Bottom, while Top Margin determines the offset in px. Position Horiz:has the optionsLeft, Right and Centre. Margin, Padding and Radius can all be set individually and the Content width may be defined in px.
Notice's Background, like all recent 1LD stacks, can be set to None, Colour, Gradient, or Image. The settings for Notification Text and Notification Icon also mirror the settings of 1LD's recent stacks.

A Close Button is optional in Notice. When activated it is always in the top right hand corner. Show Action Buttons is also optional. When activated, two buttons are positioned at the foot of your Notice. The left button is a Close button, while the right button may be assigned a link. The Height of the button may be set in px and the colour of the Button Text and Button BG are definable. Each of the buttons has individual hover settings for Button Text and Button BG.

Trigger ID lets you set an individual ID for each Notice stack you have positioned on your page. You will then find a setting Maximum height for the Notice window in Percent. Any content that can not be displayed at this height can then be scrolled.
The two final settings are Activate Cookies and Absolute Position.

Notice is a versatile stack that shouldn't be missing from any self respecting Weaver's arsenal.