Our first Stacks plug-in, for including Twitter on your Stacks page, was really well received. We had many requests for an RSS Stacks Library item. So we developed one using Feed2JS. This little plug-in allows you to enter an RSS feed and have it imported right into your Stacks page.

The feed can be easily styled in Stacks. It allows you to adjust the summary length, or turn it off all together, as well as modify the header size. It is a free download. Pop by the Stacks Plug-ins page to check out the walk-thru video and to download it.

Enjoy!

Tags: RSS, Stacks, Plug-ins

Recently YourHead Software released an API for their RapidWeaver plug-in, Stacks. And since we love Stacks so much we decided to try our hand at making some plug-ins for Stacks.

We’ve started out with a plug-in that will allow you to add a Twitter stream, or multiple streams, to a Stacks page.

You can download it for free, and check it out in action here.

We have some more ideas for plug-ins for Stacks’ library, so keep an eye on the ol’ elixir blog for more details.

Tags: Stacks, Plug-ins, Twitter

I have been working with Isaiah, from YourHead Software, on designing the user interface and icons for his latest RapidWeaver plug-in, Stacks. I’d like to tell you a little about the plug-in and show you some of the icons we developed and a little bit of the process behind developing the icons.

Slices
Each Stacks page is built from slices that are defined by you, the user. Anything from a Styled Text slice to an Image or Columns slice. You can create a complex layout quickly and with ease. Each slice needed a simple, clear icon to represent it. Isaiah had an idea of the sort of icons he was looking for to represent most of these slices. So I took his sketches and turned them into finished icons.

Interface
I also worked with Isaiah on developing the User Interface for Stacks. Below are a few of the initial ideas I came up with for the Library design and main content interface. Some were more ‘out there’ than others.

In the end we settled on the matte black Library. We also added a non-standard, classy library trigger in the lower right corner of the interface. The final UI design came out rather well, I think, and is easy to use and navigate.

Iconic
Isaiah and I were quite lucky in developing the Stacks icon. After sketching some ideas out for myself to start from I jumped right into Cinema 4D to mockup some icon ideas. Luckily these early renders were what Isaiah was looking for and the metaphor fit well with the title and functionality of the plug-in. Some of the early ideas can be seen here:

Here is the final icon we settled upon to represent Isaiah’s wonderful new plug-in.

Tags: Plug-ins, Icons, User Interface