Landing pages are a great way to get a visitor to click a Call To Action. With Marathia's latest free stack, you'll really grab your visitor's attention.

It's slowly becoming a tradition that Marathia presents us with a free stack at Christmas. ShatteringPopup is Jeroen's latest present; a popup with a fullscreen overlay that opens as an animated mosaic and closes the same way when your visitor clicks anywhere on the page.
The overlay can be set to either a colour, or an image.

It's recommended that ShatteringPopup is set to a maximum width of 320 px, so that it can be viewed in its entirety on mobile screen. The size is set via the mosaic tile size, but sadly the popup script that ShatteringPopup is based on is not responsive.

The non-responsiveness, however, is not a problem. Your popup appears in the centre of the screen and, due to the animation, it simply can't be overlooked.

The setup is simple, with settings for the tile Size and Number of tiles (you must set an even number), Border Colour, Width and Radius and , of course, the background colour or image settings.

Grab your free copy of ShatteringPopup now. Oh, and if you missed Jeroen's previous Xmas specials – XmasLights Stack from 2012, the Blink! and Marquee! Stacks from 2015, the Antiquify Stack from 2016 and the Nebula Stack and Shards Stack from 2017 – they're still available as free downloads

After Duck Soup, the world around Marten Claridge remained silent, except that every Wednesday, he was explaining live to an elite group, how to take Maximum Advantage of the Maximum Design pack. For the last month or so, these video conferences have targeted Quantum Edge (amongst other themes) and said elite group has been aah-ing and ooh-ing and rubbing their hands expectantly.

The wait is over. Duck Soup has a sibling and if you thought Maximum Design was cool, you'll find Quantum Edge has been chilled a couple of degrees more.
Quantum Edge began life as what was probably the single most complicated RapidWeaver project ever produced. In the meantime, Marten has taken sensible steps to split the project into more bite-sized modules. Five of them.

As with the Max Design pack, Quantum Edge is predominantly based on Sections modules; standalone, multi-purpose, full-width content containers that can be quickly deployed to make an instant impact on both your page and your clients. There are eighteen pages of these modules, but you don't have to purchase all eighteen of them; instead you can opt to acquire just five, or ten of them and, as a seasoned BWD user, work out for yourself how the remaining modules were created…

This time round, Marten's new package doesn't simply present Sections modules; there is a module with complete pages, one with cards, one that devotes itself to footers and one specifically aimed at the iPhone.
You can, of course, secure the complete bundle at a reduced price. But be warned: it will take you a whole day just to peruse your purchase and a month, or two, to get to grips with (i.e. understand) what Marten has put together! Quantum Edge takes advantage of the very latest BWD stacks to present subtle animations and 3D effects never before seen in RapidWeaver.

If you're looking to impress a new client, or just want to WOW the visitors to your new home page, Quantum Edge has everything you need to be able to do so easily.
Copy and Paste one of Marten's modules, replace the content with your own and the wow-effect is guaranteed!

Whichever module(s) you decide to procure, when you open your download, you'll discover that you have a Foundation, a Foundry and a Universal version for both RW7 and RW8. You'll also discover a download link to all images used within your project and – if SVGs were used in the project – you'll find all the SVGs too!

Be sure to watch Marten's tuition video on the demo page. Then, if you then still have queries, feel free to join his regular Wednesday meetings and ask any questions you may have…

I recently saw a post on the forums "sign up to our newsletter and receive a free stack". I'm a glutton for punishment, so that's exactly what I did! And I'm sure many, many more did to, because – Hey! It's free!

Dual Shard Designs. We have no idea who they are as their website gives us no information whatsoever (it's almost empty). Judging by their logo, they could be based in Mettmann in the not-so-idyllic North Rhine-Westphalia; we may never know…
… what we do know is that they are going to "provide the community with tools to build charming and attractive websites" and that their launch is being promoted with a free stack.

Floating Notice is a neat little notice that floats up and down over your important message, so that no-one will miss it! Strangely enough, I spotted a couple of messages on the forums "doesn't work!!". A very useful message, because it informs the developer exactly what is going on.

I've had no such 'luck' (I love it when stacks don't work, or when I can break them), I tested the stack with Foundation and RW8 and it works perfectly for me. I even tried a couple of different stack combinations – just to make sure.

So how does Floating Notice work? Quite simply drop Floating Notice into a Stacks page and drag the stack that you wish to highlight into it. At the bottom of Floating Notice, you'll notice a text container — this is where you place your message.

Now you just need to adjust the animation and such things as padding and you're all set. You might need to add a margin to encompass the movement, but that's all.
Unless, of course, you're not happy with a simple text message. Should this be the case, you can go wild and begin adding stacks to Floating Notice. The stacks will then jump, or float, up and down to catch a visitor's attention – depending on the animation speed you chose.

Stack settings
Colour – Font, Background
Align – Left, Centre, Right
Border Radius
Show Shadow
Animation Speed
Animation Distance
Top Position
Use Stacks Content

With a floating (or bouncing) message above your Special Offer, Book Now, or Learn More, no-one is going to miss your CTA.
And all Floating Notice is going to cost you is a subscription to the news letter, where you'll learn more about the site launch and about even more free stacks.

What are you waiting for? There's sure to be an 'Unsubscribe' button!

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!