Current State of Things

WebYep began life back in about 2003 and was originally created by Objective Development. They sold copies of WebYep from their website and provided support through their forums. WebYep 1 was quite a clunky setup; with edit boxes opening in separate browser windows! But even back then, it was an impressive system that exceeded almost everything else on the market.

In January 2012, WebYep went opensource. Max Fancourt eventually became the lead developer, and remains in charge of all its development and updates, via GitHub. WebYep 2 introduced the modal window based editors and several new elements. WebYep also began to make an appearance in some website building software, like RapidWeaver and Freeway.

Although it may appear WebYep development had stagnated, the reality is that WebYep 3 has been in development for a couple of years. By far the biggest challenge has been to update WebYep to maintain compatibility with newer versions of PHP. This required significant work to rewrite aspects, like the gallery and loop elements. It may look like little has changed on the surface, however the underlying codebase of WebYep has witnessed major changes in version 3.

This update work has needed to be done diligently, to ensure a safe and smooth transition for existing users, from WebYep 2 to WebYep 3. We wanted to avoid people being forced into rebuilding websites again. Or perhaps worse, applying the WebYep 3 update and watching their existing content vanish into a digital abyss!

As of August 2022, WebYep 3 is available on request, by email. It is a solid update and this website proves it works well. Soon it will be available for download from Github. Perhaps even a dedicated website for WebYep will become available, once again.

My interest in WebYep stems from inheriting several WebYep stacks for the RapidWeaver publishing platform in 2017. These came from Tsooj Media, who were closing down. I was extremely impressed with what WebYep could do and the numerous problems it could solve.

It was announced in March 2022 that RapidWeaver and Stacks were going to 'divorce' and go their separate ways. There had been disagreements at the top and several decisions I was unhappy about. Plus a sharp downturn in addon revenue. I've taken advantage of this bad situation to turn more attention towards WebYep. Hence the formation of this website in May 2022.

I'm finding that WebYep fits in well with the type of freelance work I do. It is fun to find creative ways of using WebYep and being able to share these experiments back with the wider WebYep community. Plus clients love the simplicity and reliability of using WebYep to make edits to their websites.

So it seems WebYep has a bright future ahead. My hope is more people will get on board and share in its longterm success.