How well does iWeb work with El Capitan?

Thanks for this thread -- it appears to me that iWeb will work with El Capitan.... but any videos posted won't play for anyone who has upgraded to El Capitan because the upgraded web browsers have disabled the Quicktime plug-in that plays videos posted by iWeb. Sure you can "re-enable" them in your browser... but I doubt that everyone you want to see it won't go through the trouble of doing that... so it appears Apple is slowing forcing people to stop using it.

Does anyone know if that is the case for everyone? It was on the few friends who have Safari, and then I checked Firefox and Crome on my computer as well.

Bummer. Because I still use it and it was a great and easy to use program.

I guess one work around is to load to Vimeo or Youtube and link the video from there.

But, I guess I am going to look at EverWeb.

Thanks,

Jeff

Hey, Jeff. I'm following so many iWeb threads right now I'm not sure which was the start of this one. I have three observations:

First, there seems to be inconsistency about whether iWeb works properly with El Capitan, or not. I have lots of websites and find that even among them there are problems on some and not on others. On several sites images [either my own photos or from the Insert Shape function in the menu bar] once they are linked become invisible when published, even though the link is still active when you mouse over it. When the page loads there is a brief flash of the outline, but the image does not appear. Remove the link, republish, and it's visible again. As I suggested above, the scariest part is, it does not occur on every website. But I can't take chances, so I've moved all my websites to an iMac still running Yosemite.

As for the videos issue, the topic is more complex than can be blamed on iWeb. Different browsers nowadays require different formats, so when I was embedding code in the html snippet I had to insert code for both .mp4 and .webm formats. [I learned this from the ever-useful Cedric Giger with his iWebFAQ.org although I decided his approach is now out of date, too. Still, it's worth checking out his site to understand the principle of videos being viewed on different browsers.] In the end the really good solution is using Vimeo [or YouTube, although I clearly prefer Vimeo]. Not only is all the code correct for all browsers, you're not clogging up your own server with huge video files. In my work I need both HD and Closed Captioning, so again that comes easy with Vimeo.

As for EverWeb, everybody seems to be talking about it. It has great features that iWeb should have had from the beginning, yes, but it also lacks important features that iWeb has. It's a program that's still learning to walk. We're all hoping that the EverWeb folks will listen to our observations [or perhaps hire Cedric as a consultant] but at present it is not as sophisticated as iWeb.

Unlike my other, more skeptical colleagues out there, I'm still counting on Apple to save the day, show their human side [ha, ha...] and come up with a new iWeb.

Richard

As for EverWeb, everybody seems to be talking about it. It has great features that iWeb should have had from the beginning, yes, but it also lacks important features that iWeb has. It's a program that's still learning to walk. We're all hoping that the EverWeb folks will listen to our observations [or perhaps hire Cedric as a consultant] but at present it is not as sophisticated as iWeb.

Hi Richard,

This is Paul from RAGE Software. Please feel free to email me with your feedback and I'm happy to go look into your suggestions to make EverWeb better. I appreciate any and all input.

You can contact me through our support system or our own discussion forums.

Thanks!

Paul

EverWeb Developer

That is a stupid statement to say that EverWeb is not as sophisticated as iWeb!! Have you taken a look at EverWeb recently? It can do so much more out of the box that iWeb could not do and that in iWeb, you had to go looking for third party options, such as menus and drop down menus - iWeb could not do that, but EverWeb can do that easily. Contact forms could not be done in iWeb, but EverWeb has it built in and there is a lot more out of the box, so how is that not as sophisticated as iWeb? I would say that EverWeb was more sophisticated than iWeb ever was.

As for thinking that Apple will save the day with iWeb - that is just naive to think this - you need to think logically and think back to why they created iWeb in the first place. They created it because of .Mac and then MobileMe that had hosting properties. Unfortunately, MobileMe was axed in favour of iCloud that did not offer web hosting, so hence no further need for iWeb, which is why it was axed and no longer sold or supported and why it has not been updated for 6 years.

You really need to get real and move on - Apple are not likely to do anything to resurrect iWeb - they have nothing to do with web hosting now and there are other companies out there that do it a lot better than Apple ever did.

Have to say, I started using Everweb last week and have been impressed not only with the software (very similar to iWeb so no great learning curve) but also with their support. Despite a couple of silly questions to them, they replied swiftly and nothing seemed to be a problem,

With no support from Apple (and not likely to be) I'm migrating my websites to software that is supported.

Yes I can only agree wiss russfaefyvie. everweb is great and still getting "greater" ... and worth any penny. And yes the support is really first class. Having as a user contact wie the programmer people is like a privilege. Whenever you have a question, the always help out.

Did u solve your problem.

Yes and no. No, because iWeb still crashes when I open it. Yes, because I bought RapidWeaver 6 to replace it. It's a good app. It doesn't have the same feel as iWeb, but it gets the job done.

Hey, Nowhereman. I'm sure you've heard it a dozen times today, but you owe it to yourself to try EverWeb, as well. It is deliberately the closest thing you'll ever see to iWeb and it already has amazing features that we wish iWeb would have had from the beginning. It's still being improved, and to the serious designer, there may be some features that iWeb has that haven't been perfected yet in EverWeb. But its developer, Paul, is on top of those issues and totally responsive to correcting them. I think you would find it much more "like home" than RapidWeaver. If you do try it, obviously there is a free demo, but if you're going to publish to your own hosting service, purchase the EverWeb license outright. It's a bargain. [No, I don't work for the company, ha, ha...] And report observations to them, they are small enough that you will be heard. [Every day I check to see when Version 2.0 will be coming out. Hint, hint... Paul?]

Richard

Thanks for the info, Richard. I will look into it. I did some homework and thought RapidWeaver would be the best bet, so I purchased it and was already reimbursed for it by the person whose website I'm administrating. I don't think she would take kindly to me buying another web design app, although nothing says I can't just buy it for myself as long as the cost is low enough.🙂

I had the same problem (using iWeb 3.04 on El Capitan 10.11.2). 😕

It seems that textlinks and hyperlinks on pictures will work, but when linking a shape (rectangulars, circles, arrows...) drawn in iWeb, it looses its color (shape becomes transparent). The link will work but the shape won't be visible to the user. This can easy be solved in either of these two ways:

- draw the shape - duplicate it. Make the shape on top transparent and put the hyperlink on it. The user will see the colored shape underneath but click on the unvisible shape on top of it.

- copy the shape, save it as an image in Preview (or in Paintbrush if you want a transparent background) - then import it in iWeb as an image on which you can put a hyperlink without problems

This solved my problem with linked shapes. I did not discover other problems in iWeb on Capitan at the moment. 🙂 Even my custom made menu and the blog surveys are working fine.

I hope to use for some more time, since my website has about 1000 pages (and still growing) and it would be a terrible job to convert it to something else 😮

Great info about making changes in the preferences. It would be easy to do if iWeb didn't crash as soon as it tries to open in El Capitan.

Hey, NowhereMan. I just saw ErikDM's description about how to overcome the one glitch with iWeb. I had made the same discovery and posted a similar description, but it seems to be on a different discussion thread.

Your situation seems not to be the norm. From what I gather, most iWeb users are not having a problem with the program crashing. I'm not having such a problem. In fact, of all the comments I've read, you seem to be the only one I can recall.

Unfortunately, I'm not a techie, but if you have an instinct for troubleshooting perhaps you can determine what's causing that problem. Do you have the latest version of iWeb [3.0.4]? Could you reinstall iWeb from another computer? Have you run all the updates for El Capitan? I'm not sure if iWeb is Java dependent, but I have found that some older Apple programs need to have both Apple's Java 6 and Oracle's Java 8 installed. I just read this discussion yesterday on the Oracle website. Here is the link: java.com/en/download/faq/java_mac.xml

Good luck and don't forget, there is always the ever-improving EverWeb.

Richard

Richard, I do have the most recent iWeb version since that is the last one Apple released and I also do have the latest update of El Capitan as far as I know (10.11.2). iWeb is Java dependent and I have the latest Java installed as far as I know. I'm not aware of Oracle's Java 8. I didn't know there was more than one. It never seemed to matter before. I will check out the link you gave me in the meantime.🙂

iWeb was working on 10.11.2 before I had installed Java (newest Java from Oracle and older Java 2015-distribution from Apple). I have iWeb 3.04 and Capitan 10.11.2 on a two year old Macbook Air. For me it works better than on Yosemite (where I had the problem with the list of blog articles not always being visible), but on Mavericks it was working better, about perfect.

I have tried trial-versions of other WYSIWYG web editors but at the moment nothing can convince me to rewrite about 1000 pages to another editor, not as long as iWeb is still workable :-) It would be to much work for now.