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Plasmic.app: Visual editing and content platform for building websites and apps

plasmic.app

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Re: Plasmic.app: Visual editing and content platform for building websites and apps

#41

Post by santa_boy »

xyzzyrz wrote: post #13

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…

This is awesome. Would love to learn more and build content at n0c0de.com using this. Please kindly fix the slack link.

Re: Plasmic.app: Visual editing and content platform for building websites and apps

#42

Post by octopoc »

xyzzyrz wrote: post #13

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…

Congrats on going open source! Which components are open sourced specifically? Is there any chance it will be self-hosteable? I don't want to host it myself any time soon but I prefer giving my money to a company where that's an option.

Re: Plasmic.app: Visual editing and content platform for building websites and apps

#43

Post by xyzzyrz »

octopoc wrote: post #42
xyzzyrz wrote: post #13

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…

Congrats on going open source! Which components are open sourced specifically? Is there any chance it will be self-hosteable? I don't want to host it myself any time soon but I prefer giving my money to a company where that's an option.

We still have work to do to make self hosting (much) easier, but yes, that's the plan!

Re: Plasmic.app: Visual editing and content platform for building websites and apps

#44

Post by octopoc »

___victor wrote: post #39
bossyTeacher wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you do need someone who really knows react/next ecosystem to manage the underlying integration. So this is react specific? It doesn't say so in the home page. It vaguely hints at it with a "Bring your data sources, React components, deployment environments, design system, and more.".

While Plasmic does offer the flexibility to export designs to other frameworks like Angular, Vue or even plain HTML, it is mainly targeting React. Some features, such as the ability to register custom components from the user's codebase, are React-specific.

Is the project open to contributions for supporting other frameworks? I'm interested in Blazor specifically, which is based on HTML. Do you see this becoming a pan-framework "design mode" tool? Do you think it's architected for that? A related question is, is it easy to use it for client-side-only stuff and leave the backend alone?

Re: Plasmic.app: Visual editing and content platform for building websites and apps

#45

Post by xyzzyrz »

santa_boy wrote: post #41
xyzzyrz wrote: post #13

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…

This is awesome. Would love to learn more and build content at n0c0de.com using this. Please kindly fix the slack link.

Fixed, thanks!

Re: Plasmic.app: Visual editing and content platform for building websites and apps

#46

Post by octopoc »

xyzzyrz wrote: post #43
octopoc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats on going open source! Which components are open sourced specifically? Is there any chance it will be self-hosteable? I don't want to host it myself any time soon but I prefer giving my money to a company where that's an option.

We still have work to do to make self hosting (much) easier, but yes, that's the plan!

Awesome, that is great news!

Re: Plasmic.app: Visual editing and content platform for building websites and apps

#47

Post by addisonj »

georg-malahov wrote: post #31
addisonj wrote: post #23

I have been using Plasmic for the last 3 months as part of a contract app where the goal was to get the technical, but not frontend experienced client able to do a lot of the design. I did a lot of custom work on components (like integrating the Supabase API and custom Auth for RLS support) as well as integrating some other endpoints/libraries. In short, I have gone pretty deep with it as a proper "app" builder compa…

I also started using Plasmic exactly 3 months ago and accomplished now one client project with all the backend/auth/frontend integrations entirely using plasmic. I agree with you that this is a great tool, that is far beyond other known builders and low-code solutions. I'm curious about your approach to integrating APIs with Plasmic. Did you utilize Plasmic's backend integrations, or did you prefer a client-side fetc…

I am using custom components for all data fetching which primarily wraps the supabase JS sdk. I have some issues I still need to make a bit more robust around caching and invalidation, but the Supabase JS sdk does help some.

I do think that is another weakness right now is the built in plugins aren't quite sophisticated for a lot of real use cases

Re: Plasmic.app: Visual editing and content platform for building websites and apps

#48

Post by superfrank »

chungwu wrote: post #18
superfrank wrote: post #11

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…

Plasmic isn't a one-time codegen tool, where you generate some code and then modify it to suit your needs. Instead, we've designed Plasmic code generation so that you can generate code, add some business logic, iterate on design, generate code again, without blowing anything away. You're never directly editing the code generated by Plasmic. You can check out how it works ( https://docs.plasmic.app/learn/codegen-guide…

That's not really the question I was asking. Most WYSIWYG's that I've used in the past are built around the idea that you can use them over and over. I'm thinking of things like Wix and Squarespace or even all the way back to Microsoft Frontpage.

My question is more focused on the idea that at some point there will be something that I need to do that can't be done through the WYSIWYG editor. I'm wondering what happens in that use case. Can I open up VS code and start changing the underlying code myself? If so how does the tool maintain those changes through iterations and how maintainable is the code that Plasmic generates?

My concern comes from the fact that I've used some of these tools in the past and the code they spit out will have things like 8 levels of nested divs for no reason, empty tags, and inlined and !important styles all over the place. I'm not saying Plasmic will do that, but I'm wondering if anyone who has used this can say how good or bad the generated code actually is.

Re: Plasmic.app: Visual editing and content platform for building websites and apps

#49

Post by chungwu »

superfrank wrote: post #48
chungwu wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plasmic isn't a one-time codegen tool, where you generate some code and then modify it to suit your needs. Instead, we've designed Plasmic code generation so that you can generate code, add some business logic, iterate on design, generate code again, without blowing anything away. You're never directly editing the code generated by Plasmic. You can check out how it works ( https://docs.plasmic.app/learn/codegen-guide…

That's not really the question I was asking. Most WYSIWYG's that I've used in the past are built around the idea that you can use them over and over. I'm thinking of things like Wix and Squarespace or even all the way back to Microsoft Frontpage. My question is more focused on the idea that at some point there will be something that I need to do that can't be done through the WYSIWYG editor. I'm wondering what happen…

The main way to extend Plasmic is to use your own React code components. So if there's something you can't achieve with our editor, you can make a component that does it, and use it in the design. An alternative way is to use the Plasmic components that we generate, which expose a lot of hooks that lets you instrument the props and rendered content within the component, without having to edit the generated component code itself. It is our explicit goal that you never need to edit the Plasmic-generated code in order to extend it to do what you want.

As for the actually generated code, it basically maps to what you've created yourself in the studio. Plasmic does have a styling / element abstraction, but it's fairly low-level, and everything is pretty close to how you'd write a React component yourself. If you're not creating empty divs in the editor, you shouldn't see empty divs in the generated code :-)

Re: Plasmic.app: Visual editing and content platform for building websites and apps

#50

Post by chungwu »

superfrank wrote: post #48
chungwu wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plasmic isn't a one-time codegen tool, where you generate some code and then modify it to suit your needs. Instead, we've designed Plasmic code generation so that you can generate code, add some business logic, iterate on design, generate code again, without blowing anything away. You're never directly editing the code generated by Plasmic. You can check out how it works ( https://docs.plasmic.app/learn/codegen-guide…

That's not really the question I was asking. Most WYSIWYG's that I've used in the past are built around the idea that you can use them over and over. I'm thinking of things like Wix and Squarespace or even all the way back to Microsoft Frontpage. My question is more focused on the idea that at some point there will be something that I need to do that can't be done through the WYSIWYG editor. I'm wondering what happen…

You can also take a look here! https://github.com/plasmicapp/plasmic/tree/master/platform/w...

This is Plasmic-generated code that we ourselves use to build our visual editor.

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