Mash up your site with PlusKit
PlusKit is a new type of RapidWeaver plugin.
Traditionally plugins have added new pages styles (such as
Sitemap or Blocks), PlusKit is a different
- It can automatically convert your photos to 'lighbox' or
'FancyZoom' format (this
is super-slick)
- It provides a powerful importing function
(@import(())), from any Styled Text you can import
another RW page
- A great use for this is if you want your
Rapidflickr photos inside a sidebar, or perhaps you
want an Accordian in a sidebar
- It provides a powerful automated backup system that
will (optionally) insert your version notes in the file
metadata to enable spotlight searching
- It provides a useful global find feature. Good for
tracking down where things went
- Seamlessly integrate Google Docs &
Spreadsheets
- It makes your Style better with powerful new tags
(<bash>, and <markdown>)
- Plus much more -- You might want to watch the
screencast here to get a
better sense.
Feel free to download a trial version of
pluskit. The 'free' version works for 10 minutes before
disabling itself, to allow it to work more than 10
minutes you can purchase a license at the Loghound.com store.
Improve your Style
Improve your Backups
Find your Stuff
Google Docs &
Spreadsheets
It is probably time for some documentation.
StylePlus adds several new tags within StyleText
and allows you to 'import' other pages from within
RapidWeaver.
The tags are:
The arguments you can pass are (default in
bold)
- cache=default \| none \|
always
- warning=true \| false
- timeout = 5 \| (some number
of seconds)
- files=_FILES_ |
(something else that you want to refer to remove
files with)
- outputdir= (some local directory you want
copied to the server)
Of course, there is also the @import ((some
other page)) command. I've not worked on this much
and it still doesn't cache
If you are just getting started you can ignore
the arguments (or said another way you will know
when you need them)
Markdown
First let's do a simple markdown example
<markdown>
*Hello from Markdown*
</markdown>
Yields
Hello from Markdown
You can read more about markdown Syntax by going
to John Gruber's "Main Site" here
Bash
The next one to focus on is the 'Bash'. This is
pretty cool since you know now execute arbitrary
code when viewing a page. There are lots of uses
for this but for now let's do something trivial
<bash>
echo -n "the current date is:"
date
</bash>
Yields
echo -n "The current date is:" date
Import
Finally let's talk briefly about the 'import'
feature. This is pretty slick and allows you to
include pages within pages
For instance:
@import((Home))
would include the contents of your 'Home' page
inline -- A very powerful way to combine multiple
page types.
If it has ever happened to you then you know that painful
feeling. your ONE copy of a document is somehow lost, deleted or
destroyed and now literally MONTHS of work is gone.
At that moment you are thinking OH #$#@ ... then
you calm down and start thinking of how much money
and time you just lost.
Why not save yourself that angst and get PlusKit
with BackupPlus!
With SavePlus you can have backup (archive) copies
automatically. Worried about Disk Space? no
problem, you can automatically compress the
backups.
You can also add version information to each backup
and optionally include that version information in
the finder comments (which, by the way, includes
enables Spotlight searches based on your version
information. Note that only the first 200
characters of the version information are included
in SpotLight searches)
PlusKit also includes a new powerful find feature. Ever
wonder where something was in your RapidWeaver project? Wonder no
more!
You can locate FindPlus in the 'Edit ->
Find Plus'
PlusKit allows you to integrate documents from
Google Docs. This allows for a sort of 'mini CMS'
system where you can have portions of your web site
that can be edited by anyone, anywhere in the world
and the changes show up instantly on your web page.
To integrate a document look at the
gdoc command.
To integrate a spreadsheet look at the
gtable command -- as
opposed to gdoc, gtable is a fairly complex
command and usually takes a bit more work (due
to the extra complexity of how to display
tables)
There is also the
gform command for doing
forms and storing the results in your google
spreadsheet (great for surveys)
This feature requires PHP support (so no .mac)
Important To use PlusKit you need to
add one, and only one, "PlusKit" page. This page is used as
a sort of 'control' center to turn options on or off