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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

#51

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…

> 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.".

This is my main concern too.

I don't understand why tools like this "pick a winner" with a specific framework instead of rendering to Web Components with a framework wrapper, or using something like Stencil[1] that can render to any framework.

[1] https://stenciljs.com/

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

#52
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> is it easy to use it for client-side-only stuff and leave the backend alone?

Yes - using Plasmic to manage landing pages design and content is our main use case!

We still need to improve the experience for open source contributions, but we are open to that! That being said, React is still our main priority at the moment.

I'm not familiar with Blazor, but you may also explore our render API (https://docs.plasmic.app/learn/render-api/). It allows fetching rendered HTML from Plasmic servers, then you would just render it in the DOM.

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

#53
post #8

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 think the barrier to entry for SaaS products is "how quickly can I create a shoddy front-end."

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

#54

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…

The generated react living alongside custom react sounds similar to MUI's low-code drag-n-drop editor that they're working on (https://mui.com/toolpad/).

Looking at the demo, does Plasmic have any killer features that MUI's offering doesn't? At the moment, MUI's main limitation is that it can't connect directly to a database: you have to go through an API, or write an API route for each app that proxies the SQL queries.

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

#55
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…

How does it stack up against MUI's Toolpad? (https://mui.com/toolpad/)

All things considered, they seem pretty similar - visual UI to generate React code that works alongside existing codebase, open-source & self-hostable, etc.

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

#57

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…

The generated react living alongside custom react sounds similar to MUI's low-code drag-n-drop editor that they're working on ( https://mui.com/toolpad/ ). Looking at the demo, does Plasmic have any killer features that MUI's offering doesn't? At the moment, MUI's main limitation is that it can't connect directly to a database: you have to go through an API, or write an API route for each app that proxies the SQL que…

Plasmic does have support to different data integrations, including databases: https://www.plasmic.app/integrations

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

#58

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…

The generated react living alongside custom react sounds similar to MUI's low-code drag-n-drop editor that they're working on ( https://mui.com/toolpad/ ). Looking at the demo, does Plasmic have any killer features that MUI's offering doesn't? At the moment, MUI's main limitation is that it can't connect directly to a database: you have to go through an API, or write an API route for each app that proxies the SQL que…

MUI's Toolpad looks pretty cool! I'm going to try it out today.

One big difference is that Plasmic is a platform and can be used by non-developers to make changes that go straight to production. Think marketers, content managers, and other non-devs that are on your team who want to ship new designs and content without bugging the dev.

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

#59
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…

How does it stack up against MUI's Toolpad? ( https://mui.com/toolpad/ ) All things considered, they seem pretty similar - visual UI to generate React code that works alongside existing codebase, open-source & self-hostable, etc.

Replied to similar comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38701366
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