My thanks to Ed Brenner and the other members of SupportCasts who have kindly put together a free video on using the spacer stack for RapidWeaver. As explained in the video, this is probably the most simple third-party stack available for the Stacks plugin. The purpose of the stack is to insert a whitespace and help divide pages up into blocks of content which are then easier to read. Whitespace is often a bit scary at first -- the concept of empty space within a commercial website may not immediately seem a sensible idea and breaks traditional rules. But as any modern web designer or developer will (should) tell you, whitespace is key in outputting pages which engage the reader and make a website a pleasant place to visit. An excellent article was written here on A List Apart talking about this concept of whitespace. This is also a topic Smashing Magazine regularly visit and make reference to.


This spacer stack was originally developed for a client I had made a bespoke RapidWeaver theme for. The website in question was looking great, with most pages having been setup using the Stacks plugin. But some of the pages were looking a bit sparse at the time of launch, and text was hunched up in the top left corner. Increasing padding around stacks was not really an option because only a maximum of 20px could be applied and this padding got applied to all sides of a stack, which in turn forced elements into a more central position. So in the course of about 5 minutes, I threw together this quick stack which would insert empty boxes into a stacks page. Combined with some columns, the result was excellent. Later I added some settings under the stack inspector. So it is now possible to customise how high this box is, which in turn adjusts the amount of whitespace between two horizontal elements.

It would be safe to say that I now use this stack more than any other stack. I think I have used the spacer stack on just about every stacks page of the ThemeFlood website and used it multiple times where I have inserted whitespace between theme preview images. For such a simple stack, it is very useful and prevents having to tediously give every element in a page selector names and messing around with CSS code etc.

You can watch the full video here: http://supportcasts.com/spacer-stack-free-show/