Alloy is a fast, easy-to-use blogging and content management solution for RapidWeaver that uses a flat-file system. This is important in a lot of ways, but one of the biggest benefits is that it makes Alloy completely free of relying on databases for your content.

Alloy's Editor allows you to write and maintain your Blog Posts, as well as manage your Embeds and Data Droplets directly from your website. The content it creates is all stored in plain text Markdown files. This makes backing up your content a breeze and also means you don't need to worry about dealing with a database at all.

Alloy processes these plain text, Markdown files and turns them into Blog Posts, Embeds and more. And it does it with great speed, meaning your visitors won't be waiting around for your content to load.

Over in the left-hand side of the page you'll find all of our documentation topics. We highly encourage everyone to start with the Getting Started section, and specifically the Quick Start topic. It shows you how to quickly and easily setup your Editor stack and where you can go from there.

Many of the documentation pages contain tutorial videos in addition to their text descriptions and instructions. On the main, overarching tutorials page we have duplicated those videos to collect them all in one location for quick and easy reference.

These videos aren't just a good way to answer questions or learn to use Alloy, but they also allow you to get a feel for how Alloy works and if it will fit into your workflow. Hop over to the Tutorials page and give them a watch, especially the Content Management Videos, which show how each of Alloy's three content types -- Blog Posts, Embeds and Droplets -- all work.

Some of the topics included on the Tutorials page include:

Prefer reading documentation to watching tutorial videos? We've got you covered there as well. These Documentation pages cover each aspect of how the Alloy stacks work. Some stacks like the Blog Entries and Editor stacks have a huge assortment of controls for fine tuning things just as you like them. We've documented what each of those controls do in their documentation pages. We also cover how to manage your content using Embeds and Droplets directly from the Editor.

Alloy is dependent on a few things being of the correct version to work right. Below is a list of requirements your setup will need to be able to meet to run Alloy:

Pages built using Alloy use the latest web technologies and thus require newer browsers to show Alloy's full potential. Your sites will shine in Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Microsoft Edge.

If you're going to be using Alloy with Foundry 3 be sure to add the Alloy 'F3 Shim' tool to the page just below the Alloy Control Center. This F3 Shim tool is included in the most recent versions of Alloy. This F3 Shim adds a bit of necessary CSS to the page to help with compatibility.

A GOOD HOST IS HARD TO FIND. We highly recommend DreamHost. We've personally hosted our sites with them for many years and sing their praises whenever asked. They meet all of the requirements for Alloy, have competitive pricing and good support.

Disclosure -- While the above link is an affiliate link. We wouldn't suggest them if we didn't believe in them and use them ourselves.

These documentation pages as well as the tutorials section of this site are a great place to start. They’ll walk you through the features of the Alloy stacks and we’ll show you how to use some of those stacks in our tutorial videos, but if you need further help, head on over to our Support Forum.

The Support Forum brings together other Foundry users like yourself where you can ask questions, share your knowledge and get insight into building and maintaining your content.