Can anybody help me with a tutorial so I can Import my existing web into the XWay web software? Thanks in advance. Mike
Hi Mike,
The first thing you should do is to work through the tutorial that is on our website:
https://www.softpress.com/xway/
There is a link near bottom of the page. You can also get here by selecting “Xway Resources” from Xway’s Help menu.
We designed Xway to be familiar to Freeway users, but there are some important differences. Xway is designed to create modern flexible websites that work on different devices (desktops, tablets, phones) — something that is more difficult to do in Freeway — and it doesn’t use table layouts (which were deprecated a long time ago). This means it is helpful to use a different design approach. The tutorial on our website goes through the steps of creating a simple website in Xway.
Once you have worked through the tutorial, you should be able to create a new version of your own website, using the same tools. You can import text by copying and pasting it from a browser, and you can do the same with images and other resources.
There are some features that haven’t yet been added to Xway. We don’t yet have support for master pages, or tables, or forms. We’re also planning to add an option to read existing Freeway documents, after we’ve added other features that Freeway import depends on.
Jeremy
On Mon, Feb 1, 2021 at 05:07 PM, Jeremy Hughes wrote:
Hi Jeremy. In your reply regarding importing Freeway to Xway, you say you can import text by copying and pasting it. I’m trying to recreate an existing Freeway site in Xway and I would prefer to copy the blocks of text rather than re-type it all. Is there some hidden formatting that is preventing me changing the alignment of paragraphs within the same box? When I paste, all the text aligns left, but when I select one line to be centred, all the paragraphs move. If I select a line and change the paragraph type to a heading, again all the paragraphs change to the same heading.
When I’ve been creating other sites from scratch and typing in new text, everything works fine. I’ve spent many hours looking at this and reading through the user guide and can’t work out where the problem lies.
Thanks
Geoff
Hi Geoff,
I wonder if the text you’ve pasted is actually divided into paragraphs.
If you click three times (to select a paragraph), does that match what you think is a paragraph?
Can you post a link to the site that you’re copying from?
Jeremy
The text I was importing was from an existing Freeway document, where one can see the very useful ‘invisibles’, so certainly a paragraph block.
However – a required switch-off of my computer meant I had to quit xway (something I hadn’t done for at least 5 days). When I reopened the file, everything had gone back to normal. I’ve been working the site for a couple of days now without any reoccurrence of the formatting problem. Perhaps a gremlin somewhere.
Regards
Geoff
I’ve sometimes had problems copying from Freeway to Xway and other programs. I think this is because Freeway uses old (Carbon) pasteboard APIs.
An alternative approach is to preview from Freeway to a browser, and then copy from the browser to Xway.
Jeremy
Jeremy, I became a refugee from Freeway when it seemed it was gone forever and subsequently re-created my sites using Rapidweaver. Besides that application being a drain on my bank account, I find it awkward and difficult to use and now a new version of Foundation requires learning it all over again. After using the Xway tutorial I find it so much more pleasant to use and look forward to transitioning back. I understand your suggestion about recreating the site in X-way using what’s in a browser window of the old site would be the same for any site, no matter how it was created, right? I might go ahead and try that. I wonder, though,if there are there any plans for importing a site’s files directly, say, by downloading them from the server (I think some use an application called sitesucker for this) and then importing into X-way? Thanks for all the work and care that is going into this application.
Harold Appel
New York City
MacOS 10.15.7 (19H1030)
iMac (27-inch, Late 2012)
Hi Harold,
You should be able to import content from any website in this way. I added an appendix to the Xway User Guide which has some more information.
In future, we’re planning to add a way to import content from Freeway documents, and we’re also interested in adding a way to import HTML content later on (it’s on our radar).
But there are some other things that we need to do first.
Jeremy