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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

#61

Post by xyzzyrz »

promiseofbeans wrote: post #55
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…

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.

There's a vibrant industry of similar tools - but lots of differences and room to innovate!

Just a few of the differences: Plasmic....

- Is not specific to MUI

- Supports actual design control (beyond theming)

- Supports defining reusable components in the editor, with slots/props/variants

- Is suitable for websites and applications where page speed matters (static/SSR pre-rendering and data fetching, image optimization, etc.)

- Has a more structured layout system

- Is highly configurable UI for different personas - e.g. non-developers on the team

- Has cross-project imports / reusable libraries

- Has Figma import

- More...

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

#62

Post by Lincolnmitchell »

I've been using Chakra UI components in Plasmic for around 1 year after trying to do this in Framer and UXPin Merge. Plasmic is what Framer was hyped to be but did not deliver, it's the best I have found.

The downside to Plasmic has been the community size and therefore lake of support so I hope Plasmic going open source will resolve these issues.

These types of tools can be overlooked by traditional siloed Design and Development, and is best suited to hybrid teams were the power of designing with code components can be realised.

Plasmic was like discovering a Gem, a rough diamond that a hybrid open source community get the chance to shape.

I highly recommend this product!

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

#63

Post by xyzzyrz »

promiseofbeans wrote: post #54
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…

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…

Just some of the differences: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38701406

And yes you can connect directly a database - critically, Plasmic lets you define backend operations that work with auth: https://docs.plasmic.app/learn/integrations/#security

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

#64

Post by mattgreenrocks »

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…

It looks very nice for exploring the large design space of what UI an app needs, and actually laying it out. I think in terms of the backend, but the gap to visualize what the frontend needs like can be large; the blank page stares back so much. Hoping something like this can help.

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

#65

Post by ___victor »

claytongulick wrote: post #51
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.".

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/

It really depends on how well you want the design to integrate with your codebase, which is where most of Plasmic power lies on, such as: leveraging your existing custom components as building blocks within the design tool; or adding heavier instrumentation to props and rendered contents on the code side.

It is possible to use Plasmic's render API (https://docs.plasmic.app/learn/render-api/) to fetch the rendered HTML and just render your designs using any framework, but that means it's a more limited experience.

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

#66

Post by jason_plasmic »

armchairhacker wrote: post #60

WYSIWYG web design has been tried since the internet has existed, but people keep coming back to writing UI in code. How does this compare to other tools? What is the best WYSIWYG tool today?

I think, with most WYSIWYG editors in the past, a developer runs into some limitation, forcing them out of the system into uncharted/hacky territory. But for Plasmic, developers are a first-class citizen.

For example, one huge advantage with Plasmic is that Plasmic components run within your React tree. This means you can naturally embed Plasmic components in your React components, and even the other way around!

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

#67

Post by Lincolnmitchell »

Lincolnmitchell wrote: post #62

I've been using Chakra UI components in Plasmic for around 1 year after trying to do this in Framer and UXPin Merge. Plasmic is what Framer was hyped to be but did not deliver, it's the best I have found. The downside to Plasmic has been the community size and therefore lake of support so I hope Plasmic going open source will resolve these issues. These types of tools can be overlooked by traditional siloed Design an…

I'd add that our current workflow is to complete our webapp designs using code components and deploy via Vercel as a prototype. Later we aim to publish production directly from Plasmic. These little steps are addressing cultural issues mostly, a the idea of a design team publishing the FE touching a lot of cultural issues and fears like reporting lines, processes, job loss - change is scary.

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

#69

Post by chungwu »

claytongulick wrote: post #51
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.".

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/

We wanted to support tight integration with people's existing codebase, so that it is easy to use your React components directly in Plasmic, or to read data from your React contexts provided from outside of Plasmic, or to have your code components communicate with each other via React contexts when they're used within Plasmic, etc. There's power in being in "one React tree" with your existing app.

I imagine it's possible to achieve this with other frameworks too, though the integrations would be deep and bespoke for each framework. We've just decided to focus on React first.

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