11–20 of 88 posts
I have no problem using these on smaller projects that are fairly static, but on more complex things it has always felt to me like the time you save by using a tool like this, you end up losing when you want to do something not supported by the tool and you have to hack through the spaghetti code it outputs.
Can anyone speak to the quality of the code that Plasmic puts out?
I think the GitHub page is probably a bit clearer than our website right now:
https://github.com/plasmicapp/plasmic
Basically, it's a visual page builder that plugs into your own Next.js/Remix/React/etc. codebase. Your marketing/content/design team can then build and publish pages without filing tickets on eng. This (content management) is the main use case.
The most interesting aspect is that editors can drag and drop React components from your own codebase as building blocks. This is very powerful, esp. with e.g. data fetching React components.
Why open source? Because we love the tool. Plasmic has been in production deployment at companies big and small. But we think it can grow far beyond ourselves as an open source project. We’d love to see a broader community take it in unexplored directions. Community users have even started using it to build emails with React.Email and mobile screens in React Native.
Would love to hear folks' questions and feedback!
Excited to see this posted here! I think probably because we announced it going open source today. I think the GitHub page is probably a bit clearer than our website right now: https://github.com/plasmicapp/plasmic Basically, it's a visual page builder that plugs into your own Next.js/Remix/React/etc. codebase. Your marketing/content/design team can then build and publish pages without filing tickets on eng. This (co…
- Webflow, Wordpress and other page builders
- Retool and other tool builders
- Glide and no-code app builders
- Contentful and other CMSes
Today these are different tools to specialize in, but the line between, say, a website and an application is blurry (consider an ecommerce storefront with user logins, or a customer portal). With the right foundations, we think these can be unified—Plasmic’s UI can adapt to different levels of control for different personas/tasks.
So a newer use case is that you can use it to build applications as well as websites, for both developers and non-developers. This is the more experimental side of the project, beyond the content management use case.
I don't really get what this does. The front page feels like a lot of empty marketing, but I still don't understand how it works...?
Our users have used Plasmic to build all sorts of things, from websites and e-commerce storefronts, to Retool-like internal tools, to full web apps (major parts of the Plasmic visual editor itself is built with Plasmic!). The most popular use case we have is as a CMS -- once developers set up Plasmic, the marketers are able to design and publish sections of the website without developer involvement. One remarkable thing is that the dynamically-fetched Plasmic-generated design is part of the same React tree as the rest of your React app, so it is able to read from your React contexts, etc., making it possible to have rather deep and interesting integrations into your site.
Ultimately, Plasmic generates React code from your designs. This code can either live in your code base alongside the rest of your code, or be dynamically fetched (like in the CMS use case).
Just a sample of the output would go a very long way in telling me whether or not it can produce anything I can use.
I guess Firefox 121 isn't modern enough...
My question with these WYSIWYG editors is always how maintainable is the code they output? I have no problem using these on smaller projects that are fairly static, but on more complex things it has always felt to me like the time you save by using a tool like this, you end up losing when you want to do something not supported by the tool and you have to hack through the spaghetti code it outputs. Can anyone speak to…
You can check out how it works (https://docs.plasmic.app/learn/codegen-guide/), but also happy to answer questions here!
Eventually someone is going to build a good enough visual app builder with AI assistant, and nobody will ever know except that a mysterious startup with seemingly unlimited resources and agility is taking over every SaaS market.
I don't really get what this does. The front page feels like a lot of empty marketing, but I still don't understand how it works...?
Seems like it’s Framer-meets-Retool. Framer has a great UI builder, but doesn’t connect to backends very well. They have their own CMS but the net result is that you typically use it for marketing sites but not business app interfaces. Retool can connect to a lot of different data sources but is ugly and wouldn’t help build a customer-facing app that I would feel proud of. They give you easy to use UI primitives to g…