Freeway has grown a lot since version 4! I think you will find that a lot of what made it easy to learn is still there, but it’s definitely starting to experience some growing pains. A lot of the new dimensions and positioning settings are extremely important for building inline layouts, but Freeway is still difficult to use in that mode, suffering from a jumpy experience when moving things in source order, for example. There’s also the huge chicken-or-egg problem of making an inline layout – how do you get that design you want when it’s so hard to manipulate inline boxes and position them just so.
There’s a new-ish feature in the Relatively Positioned Layout Action, which came in 5 or 5.5, can’t recall which. This is frankly a piece of magic, as it allows you to sketch a layout in the usual manner, then convert that absolutely positioned layout into a proper inline layout without any (or many) changes. When you’re working on blogs and other indeterminate-amounts-of-content projects, you will find that this is the only way to make a page that stays together when the content shifts.
There’s nothing built-in to Freeway 6 that makes blogs natively, but the Blogger Action is still there, and works about the same. If you want to design a Blogger blog that looks exactly like the rest of your site, it’s pretty much the only thing going. In your time away, a number of micro-CMS products have come along that make blogging relatively painless. There have been a lot of Freeway projects incorporating Perch or Pulse lately, both of those have blog settings, Perch especially. But they also need some manual labor on your part to convert your Freeway layout to a template. Perch has a reasonable but nearly vertical in places learning curve. Once you’re up, though, it’s a very well-designed and easy to use admin system.
The Social Media thing is a bit of a mixed bag. There are Actions for it, nothing native in Freeway, but easy to use and add. I personally warn anyone who comes near not to do this – it’s basically collusion with a spy network, as just having a “like” or “plus 1” button on your page gets additional data into the various Borg cubes out there about every one of your visitor’s browsing habits: whether they click or don’t. If you want to create a link from your page to your Facebook page or Google Plus page, then fine. You can even make it look like a Like button if you like. But embedding 30K of JavaScript into your page, just so that your visitors may be surveilled with greater ease, does not seem like a bargain with the Devil that I would like anyone to make.
Freeway has been able to host video since 1997 (when it was released). Further, there are YouTube and Vimeo Actions if you want to outsource the actual hosting and bandwidth to a third party. Freeway 6 includes HTML5, which brings a lot of new options to the video hosting battle. I also wrote an Action for Freeway 5+ that lets you use the Sublime Video player, which automates the cross-browser/platform part of that problem, too.
Hope this helps, and you get a 30-day trial to see for yourself!
Walter
On Dec 5, 2013, at 10:16 AM, SkipII wrote:
I used Freeway (v. 4) a few years ago but switched to WordPress. WP has too many design limitations, so I’m thinking of switching back to Freeway (now v.6?) However, I want to be clear-eyed on any issues. Hope somewhere here can help:
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I have a LOT of blogs on my current WP site. Is there a way to transfer that content over to FW?
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How good is FW now about having social media links on the site (I recall it was not ver good before)
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Can FW host video?
Any opinions on why FW is now far superior to the ease of WP, I’m all ears. I liked FW before but found it hard to learn at times. Maybe new version is better?
Thanks!
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