Sorry, because you have been asked this thousands of times over the last years. But 16 July 22 I am asking again - how is it looking for conversion from my Freeway sites to Xway. The prospect of recreating them is too much work and time. But it would of course be fantastic to be able to convert…
Hi Steve,
It’s on our list, but we haven’t started working on it yet.
It’s not an easy task, I’m afraid. One issue: many Freeway sites (including all Freeway Express sites) use table layout, which has been deprecated for many years, and is not supported by Xway. One way we could import these layouts would be to convert them to actual tables - which Xway doesn’t currently support but will in future. Freeway sites that use CSS layout should be easier to import, but it’s not trivial.
We are planning to get there, but it’s going to take us a while longer.
Thanks. I understand the complexities. I am just updating one of my Freeway sites, and its getting harder and harder…but just dont have the time capital to firstly learn the wonderful X-way, and then completely rebuild this site, which has over 60 pages…so yeah, look forward to that day.
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How about converting a site made with Rapidweaver to Xway? Is that possible at all? When it seemed like Freeway was gone I became a refugee using Rapidweaver which I regret. I wonder if I ever can convert my 4 sites to Xway without starting over? Thanks.
What does a Rapidweaver “site document” look like? Freeway has the whatever.fwdocument file, which stores a database comprising the entire site, every page, and all their geometry. Does Rapidweaver have a similar compound document comprising the entire site?
How possible it might be depends a lot on that document (if there is one) and how it composes the site internally. My guess is that until Freeway documents are readable by Xway (where by readable I really mean importable – I doubt the two site documents have anything remotely in common these days) I doubt there would be any bandwidth for this sort of project at Softpress Towers. But if the format of the document is readable in some way, there may be a way. It would also depend a lot on how scriptable Xway is or becomes.
Walter
Hi Harold,
You can import a site into Xway by copying and pasting text and resources from a browser (see “Appendix 2: Importing an existing website” in the Xway User Guide).
Hi folks. Long time Freeway lover here. From about 2012. I have a dozen websites in Freeway, including some currently active and important ones. I just got an M1 mac. Sigh. Parallels no longer runs Mojave, which is the absolute and complete and sudden end to my capacity to update my sites. That will be ok for a month or two, but obviously thats not sustainable in the medium future. So I am faced with a difficult situation. I am currently finishing a phd, so dont have the time to learn Xway. And even then, theres no way to import Freeway…so what do I do? Jeremy says, copy and paste text from a browser. Seriously -is that the best way? Is there nothing else I can do thats smoother than that? God, that sounds like a very long process. I know that XWay is not table based, but surely later Freeway sites are not either, right? …
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Hi Steve,
Freeway import is still on our to-do list. Many Freeway sites (including all Freeway Express sites) are table-based, so there are limits to how well we will be able to import them.
Xway’s document format is quite different from Freeway’s, but our goal is to have some form of import that can import text and resources and preserve formatting for CSS layouts.
This isn’t a situation we would have chosen. If Apple had not abandoned the system APIs that Freeway uses, we could have continued supporting it while we developed Xway as its successor.
Xway is similar to Freeway. It has an Inspector panel that is similar to Freeway’s Inspector palette, and a Site panel that is similar to Freeway’s Site panel. Many of the keyboard shortcuts are the same. The main difference is that Xway prioritises flexible (inflow) CSS layout so that sites adapt to different devices (desktops, tablets, phones). Freeway could also create flexible sites, but it is more difficult because Freeway wasn’t designed to do this and its inflow layout code is buggy.
Thanks Jeremy
Yeah, fair enough. I dont have the time, but have the bright idea of advertising on Upwork to find someone who can convert all my websites. Of course, no one there will know XWay, but its not hard to learn. And who knows, they might pick up work from some other good Freeway folks who also dont have the time but would love to have things converted, even if it costs something
Maybe someone on here would be willing to do the work to convert your sites to Xway for you. Perhaps starting a thread for the Seeking or Help Wanted would work.
I could easily imagine this becoming a cottage industry before Xway grows that magical importer (and maybe even after, if it follows in the steps of the old Freeway Import HTML feature).
Walter
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