Greetings! I apologize in advance because I am really not tech savvy in the least. I started with Freeway Express back in the day and worked my way up to Freeway Pro. I use my website for my personal business and found that at the time Freeway was the most user friendly of them all.
Now that Freeway Pro is no longer working on my new desktop, I’m weary of using my old laptop to update my site. One of the key features of my site that draws lots of traffic is that I offer free drum transcriptions in PDF that visitors can click on and download. Xway presently doesn’t have the Actions menu that Freeway had.
I’m confident there is a workaround. I’m just not skilled enough to know what that is. I was thinking I could use the Resources function to link to an external site but am worried if I use Google Drive or something like that I’ll create a security risk for myself.
Do any of you have suggestions for me that can be laid out in a manner a kindergartner could understand?
Here is the link to my Transcriptions page. As you can see, I have quite a few and add to them regularly as I transcribe songs for my students.
Well, at the moment, you’re stuck at the point where Freeway is annoying to use, but Xway isn’t ready to support Actions, which is traditionally where someone like me might step in and offer a solution you could use (without coding much or at all) to automatically build that list of downloadable files.
If these files are meant to be free for all, not gated behind a paywall or similar, then it is fairly trivial for a server to generate a list of links for you, without requiring any hand-editing of the HTML page, and display that list in the context of your existing list of links page. Then as you add new files (by simply uploading those files into a particular folder on your server), the list would update to include that new file. In your page layout, you would replace the current, hand-curated list with a Markup Item that contains the directive to ask the server for the current list. When you’re working in Freeway, you would not see the list, but when you visit the page on the server, all of the files would appear. This approach could work in Xway as well, as it currently has Markup Items, so if you take the time to rebuild your site in the new app, then you won’t be wasting any effort given the wait until Actions are here.
That’s how I would attack this problem, given my understanding of what you’re trying to do. Many years ago, I wrote an Action for this sort of thing: AjaxFileListing - ActionsForge
This Action is completely out of date, and would probably not work on a modern version of PHP (the server-side language it uses to generate the list). So I don’t recommend you try to use it on your Freeway site.
If you want to get in touch through a private message, we can talk about how to solve this in more specific terms.
The ability to link to PDFs (and other files) is built into Xway (you don’t need an Action to do this):
Create a link
Choose Resource from the Link Type popup
Select a PDF from the Resource popup (choose Other to open a file dialog)
This works in much the same way as the Link to PDF and Graphic Link to PDF Actions do in Freeway. Xway creates a link to the PDF and automatically includes it. Xway supports three types of link: Page links (equivalent to Internal links in Freeway), Resource links (equivalent to “Link to File/PDF” Actions in Freeway), and External links (same as Freeway).
Oh man! This is excellent news! If this works like Freeway’s link to PDF that will be a game changer for me as I’m really not comfortable with HTML or messing with files on the server.
Thank you so much. I can’t wait to give this a try!
One difference between Freeway and Xway is that basic functionality is built into Xway and doesn’t require separate Actions. In addition to Resource links, Xway also has direct support for Exhibeo slideshows, navigation menus, and iframes. Iframes can be used for YouTube videos, Vimeo videos, Google maps, etc.
Having said that, we do plan to support some kind of Action technology in a future version of Xway.
You can create an external link that uses “mailto” (choose External as the Link Type and Mailto as the Protocol), but you might want to obfuscate the URL that you use, if you’d like to make it harder for spambots to harvest your email address.
