RGILBREATH  Ok, before looking at the 2 star rating at writing off RW completely you should understand that I've been trying to use it for a commercial website and doing all of the coding by hand. For this purpose, it stinks. Sorry RealMac, but it's true. That being said, if I was doing a personal website or a friends/family photo sharing site I'm sure it would be just fine. It would probably be easier than most as it handles all of the complicated file sharing and blogging code for you. But if your going to be hand coding your pages and you need them to exact specs then this is not the product for you. So far I've experienced things like: nested div's disappearing when assigning more than 3 CSS attributes to them, RW assigning the attributes of child div's to its parent, built in options for choosing theme variations within different pages not working correctly (or at all sometimes) and other such application bugs that simply make it unusable for commercial web sites (at least in my opinion).

I purchased it with the built in options like different page styles that are already coded and set up for QT movies, file sharing, blog pages, contact pages, etc. I figured it would be nice to be able to focus on the content and let the application handle the longer code for me. And as I'm sure it does handle those codes well, it unfortunately is extremely buggy when it comes to the actual content (if you're planning on hand coding). And yes, as many others have mentioned, having to switch between is preview and edit is a huge pain in the rear.

Again, if you're doing some personal web pages and don't want to learn HTML, CSS, PHP, etc., then this may be a perfectly fine product for you that offers a more robust feature set than iWeb. But if you're hand coding anything remotely complicated, or if you're managing a commercial site, I would have to recommend an application that is actually designed for HTML editing program like DreamWeaver.  
(Version 4.1.3)

MACLOVER1.1  After using RW for a few years, I have yet again experienced file losses, files that will not upgrade from version 3 to 4 and so on. Just read the forums here and there and you'll see this apperas to be common amongst RW users. Have now decided to trash this application completely. An unstable application is scary in a work environment. Am turning to FLUX.  
(Version 4.1.3)

DIEM  I have been using Rapidweaver for nearly three years now, and it is my primary tool for developing sites. It feature base is HUGE, and more importantly the community for development of plug-ins and themes is huge as well.

I find it odd to have it compared to iWeb, as that is for beginners, and this is not. Although user friendly, it does have a small learning curve, and should be placed in the pro-sumer categry, firmly between iweb and Dreamweaver. Spend the time learning, and you will see you can do most of the things discussed as downsides.  
(Version 4.1.2)

PCHARLES67  I've tried this application on and off for a while now and still find it incredibly clunky to use. I think the problem I have is that this is not a WYSIWYG editor in the same way that most modern editors in this category are (iWeb, Goldfish, Sandvox). The need to switch back and forth between the edit and preview modes is incredibly annoying.

I also found myself extremely frustrated by the way changing a theme applied the theme to my whole site. In iWeb and Sandvox the theme was associated with the site, but you could select pages from different themes if you wanted to give different parts of your site a different feel. It may be present in RW, but over the various tests I have still not found it. I was also frustrated by the way I am locked into a themes layout with RW when applications such as iWeb allow me to move content around much more freely.

I understand from many reviews that the code for RW is considered superior to that produced by iWeb, but as a general user I am more interested in ease of development than geeking out on clean code since most readers will be interested in the content and not the code.

Finally, I am not sure why this product is so much more expensive than the competition and often requires costly plugins to make it do interesting things.  
(Version 4.1)

MACTALKER  RW works pretty well. It's a bit clunky but when it comes to producing the xml documents for feeds this is where it goes belly up unfortunately. The resulting xml does not comply to iTunes requirements so if you have a podcast don't expect iTunes to find it.  
(Version 4.1)

22DUKE  Hm it says ...web design application to help you easily create professional looking web sites in minutes.

That might be in theory correct but in practice even simple pages need a lot of tweaking to get a desired outcome.

Yes you can drag pictures from iPhoto however they are not re-sized and end up in original size, the resizing in RW then distorts the picture and is very cumbersome anyway.

Dare you to move a picture in your library RW will come up with an unspecific error message that the picture is missing (no mention where or on which page) and there is no way to re assign the new correct path or what would be even better that RW actually starts looking for it on the computer.

Still nice piece of software just don't expect to get anywhere quick. As previous poster I would have appreciated if dev team would have concentrated on important features and stability instead of gimmicks like animated upload screens.  
(Version 4.1)

WALT9500  Finding a proper rating is pretty hard for RapidWeaver, actually.

While it does work as advertised, and gets the job done, it has quite a lot of little issues (the multiple documents bugs, and more).

Also, instead of adding needless eye candy for RapidWeaver 4, the developers should have improved reliability and speed. I really hate to see the stupid progress animation while I sit there waiting for RapidWeaver to just save my document!!!!!

And some things are plain missing, such as proper table support, and even a Find feature that really works (and not just for the main text of the one current page!!!!!)

But again, it can do a lot, and for me, the main reason I have chosen it was the large number of visual attractive themes available, and the ability to handle meta tags properly (important for search engines...).  
(Version 4.0.1)

SMALLBUSINESSMAN  4.1 seems to freeze consistently as reported all over the Internet. The question is why is RealMac not responding?  
(Version 4.0.1)

CHATELP  I've been a regular and happy user of RapidWeaver for a couple of years and have never seen so many bugs as in the latest 4.0 release :

- It may forget to publish some of your modified pages (even if you force mark them as modified)

- The WYSIWYG editor doesn't necessarily output the correct visual styles.

- If you have 2 modified projects opened and publish one, it will mark both as published.

- and so on ...

Also, but this is a matter of taste, there is waaay to much visual fuss in the GUI. I usually don't mind a few over the top animations, but in this case it is a real usability setback (e.g the coverflow like animation when opening and publishing files). I guess they had to follow this "delicious" trend, IMHO it's more gratuitous than delicious...

I hope the most impairing bugs will be corrected really soon cause now I'm considering reverting to the pre-4.0 release and getting my update reimbursed.  
(Version 4.0)

MAESTROJAL  I've tested beta versions of RW4. These bugs have been around for all the versions I tested. I sent a copy of my files before and after conversion to RealMac. Hopefully a fix is in the works.  
(Version 4.0)