Navigating your Stacks Library & creating Smart Folders
Since Foundry 3 and Foundry 2 can both coexist side-by-side within your Stacks library, I’ve taken some steps to help you in sorting the two libraries and finding what you’re looking for with ease. In this post we’ll look at not only sorting our libraries but also how we can build Smart Folders in Stacks 5 for both Foundry 3 and its predecessor.
"Look, I may not be an explorer, or an adventurer, or a treasure-seeker, or a gunfighter, Mr. O'Connell, but I am proud of what I am." "And what is that?" "I... am a librarian."
Let’s first have a look at the Arrange settings inside of the Stacks Library. To do so we’ll open up the Library settings by clicking on the Library button with the gear icon at the bottom of the Library itself, as seen below. Inside you’ll find an “Arrange Stacks” menu item. When hovered over it will given you an assortment of options for modifying the sort order of the Library.
I highly recommend using the “By Tag” option. This will sort the various tools in your library into groups specified by the developer of the addons in your library. Many developers put their various tools into categories. This is definitely the case with Foundry 3. I’ve presorted the tools into helpful categories such as “Content” or “Navigation” to help you more easily find what you’re looking for.
Stacks offers other ways of arranging content in your Library, so pick what works for you, but I find sorting “By Tag” to be the most user friendly.
"Seventy percent of all archeology is done in the library."
The Stacks Library provides us a couple of very powerful tools. The first one we’ll take a look at is the search bar. This allows us to narrow in on the items we need quickly. Provide a search term here and Stacks will instantly sift through your large library of tools to find matches. Many users however use the search feature to find groups of tools, like Foundry for example.
In the past you could simply search for Foundry and all of the Foundry related tools would appear. Now with two versions living in your library I wanted to make it easy to sort for just one version of Foundry at a time. So I added quick key phrase tags to both Foundry 2 and Foundry 3.
From the search bar in the Stacks Library you can type F2 or F3 depending on the version you’re looking for, and the library will pull up just the tools related to that version of Foundry. The latter also includes the F3 Shim for Alloy users as well.
These quick search terms make it easy to access all of the Foundry tools you’re looking for, but we can take that a step further even with Smart Folders in Stacks v5.
"Ah! Another Weasley. I know just what to do with you... GRYFFINDOR!"
Stacks v5 introduced a new Smart Folder feature that allows us create groupings of Stacks addons that we can return to time and again without needing to type our search terms each time. Previously Stacks had static custom folders for this task, but it would often lead to confusion for users when a new tool was added to a big package of addons, like Foundry. The static folders were unaware of new additions and didn’t get automatically added to these folders. Enter Smart Folders.
No we can create Smart Folders that maintain their contents based on search terms. So again we can use the F2 and F3 search terms in the library so have folders that will contain both versions of Foundry’s tools separately, and as a bonus the folders will auto adjust their contents for any new tools that are added in the future.
Let’s build a Smart Folder for Foundry 3 now.
Go to the bottom of Stacks Library in RapidWeaver and click on the large Plus button, pictured below.
When you do you’ll get a new folder like so:
The first thing we’ll do is insert a Title. We’ll call this Folder "Foundry 3.” Now for the magic. Let’s turn on the Smart Search toggle as well as type F3 into the Smart Search field (if you use Foundry 3 for the search term it will hide the Alloy F3 Shim tool from the Smart Folder). Once we’ve done that, click the small down arrow next to the Smart Search field. When we do we’ll be presented a series of checkboxes. We’’re going to turn all of them off except the “Tags” and “Stacks” checkboxes, like so:
You can then customize the folder appearance if you like adjusting the icon and color. This is completely optional however. Once we’re done, click off of the popup dialog and it will close. You now have a Smart Folder that will show you just the Foundry 3 tools when you click on it.
To build a Foundry 2 specific Smart Folder, repeat the above instructions but use F2 for the search term instead.
You can now switch back and forth really easily and have quick access to all of your Foundry 3 tools with the click of a mouse.
