Add More Features to iWeb Sites with iTweak
With the introduction of iWeb in the latest versions of Apple’s iLife suite of media/lifestyle applications, making and publishing your own website has never been easier. The incredibly straightforward design tools offer a true WYSIWYG web-creator tool, and a highly customizable one at that. iWeb does, however, have its limitations and lacks some capabilities that many people would like to see available. Enter iTweak, a nifty freeware app from Guimkie, that offers a handful of powerful and useful features that can help make your iWeb site that much better.
iTweak, formerly “iWeb Expander”, allows the end user to make some very handy additions to make his or her site that much more professional and full-featured. When you open iTweak for the first time, you’re greeted by a fairly lengthy Welcome screen that advises you to take advantage of the tutorials available on Guimkie’s site. They offer detailed tutorials for almost every feature of the program, and it makes it that much easier to learn how to make all of the changes you want.
After you get to the main screen, you can start to dig right in and make any of the changes you want. After you use the iWeb option to “Publish to a Folder…”, you can start to work with iTweak. You choose the folder of the site by clicking on the “Choose Published Site” button, and then proceed to tweak whatever you want. The app makes it super easy to add a favicon (the small icon present in your address bar before the ‘http’), integrate Google search, or even install a hit counter. Additionally, when you’re publishing to a non-.mac/MobileMe server that supports PHP, you can add in a Contact form, something that I know I personally miss from using RapidWeaver. Adding the ability for comments, and even adding site-wide security, is only a click away. Finally, you can search and replace any code globally in the entire site, so making changes to small things is really made simple and straightforward as well.
After you’re done making all of your changes, you simply click on the “Process Site” button and can then upload it to your FTP server and allow it for all people to see. After asking a friend to test it with .mac, he reported that it certainly worked as advertised, but that the PHP functions do not work since .mac doesn’t support PHP in iWeb sites. However, for those people who are using iWeb to quickly whip up sites for other locations, the functionality added by iTweak is certainly a welcomed addition.
iTweak is a free application from Guimkie software, but donations are accepted.
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