Then continue doing what you are doing with RW + Stacks or StacksApp as your investment in all those stacks will remain unaffected whether others use Blocs5 or not.
However, just because you have had to make your investment in RW doesn’t mean that the stuff you build with RW, can’t be built with a competing product such as Blocs5. No doubt there are fringe or specialised things that Blocs can’t do andequally things that Stacks can’t do.
I see that there are many stacks in your investment list that each cost more that Blocs5 itself costs. I’m not rubbing it in, but just trying to keep a sense of perspective on your stack list that must surely be well over $1000. To learn that Blocs5 can do so much will be a shock for many Weavers, but it does what it says on the lid.
I remember these almost identical forum discussions when Affinity entered the Adobe Photoshop market. The Adobe crowd were mightily spooked and hacked off that they had invested a fortune on Adobe addons, books, video courses, etc., and out of the blue, Affinity delivered a relativly low cost solution that did everything Photoshop could do.
it seems that you have a strong interest in promoting Blocs within this forum.
I started with a brief review of Blocs5, and then several people made incorrect assumptions and statements about Blocs5. I merely corrected these claims and provided examples. While not directly promoting Blocs, this covered many of the capabilities of Blocs. Competition is good.
The RW4ALL forum isn’t a RapidWeaver only discussion forum by any means. Discussion of other web builders is encouraged and the most discussed topics (based on views), are about Blocs or Elementor and not RapidWeaver. This forum is free from commercial influence and restrictions about what can be said. That’s a very good thing, but when someone makes claims that cannot be backed up, there are plenty here who will correct it.
This may be one of the big differences between Blocs and Stacks, though. A stack is a template first, and added functionality second. The simplest stack is just HTML with placeholders for content that can be entered in Edit mode or through the interface in the HUD. From this point of view a stack is a productivity tool, in the same way that a company which has dozens of Word templates for memos and agendas and reports and invoices etc. would see these as improving productivity across the range of their activities, rather than as a complex way of managing the functionality of Word.
What’s happening with stacks now — which has taken a while — is that we‘re getting to the point where it‘s possible to build a component library. That is, to create a collection of elements that one has built with one or more stacks, styled up and can reuse within a site or family of sites. One of the reasons this has taken a while is that stacks have been slowly evolving to allow more and more customisation without losing their basic template functionality. This isn‘t just about giving more control through the interface, it’s also about using things like CSS custom properties to allow styling choices like colors and fonts to be controlled at site or page level (Stuart’s ‘Palette’ is an excellent example of this). For me, though, the key piece is container queries, which will allow us to specify what a component looks like according to the size of the space it fills — which goes a whole lot further than what what we can do at the moment with media queries. This will be a game-changer.
Maybe you’re working towards a similar end with Blocs — I hope so (you are going to have to address the copying from one document to another, though). But in terms of where RW/Stacks is, it is an exciting place to be. And some developers are beginning to exploit it — Stuart, for instance, with his component projects for Source, or Davide with his for F6.
This is already addressed. You can store Pages, Blocs, Colours and Style Classes for re-use in any project. You can also export and share these too (with the exception of the Styles).
You can save any layout as a Bloc with 1 right click.
Here is a test layout as this appears on the Canvas (Edit area) showing the right click function - Add Bloc to Library. This saves the Bloc in the App so is accessible across Projects:
Effectively this is visual Stacks Templates but with more customisable interface and an actual image of the layout. Even if Stacks could currently do that, the images would need to be based on the Previewed image. That would be a great feature for StacksPro to incorporate in the future.
You just pretty much described how Brics also function. You could equally create a media container query Bric and infact there is a Dynamic Media Query Bric in the Blocs Store. If there is demand there will very likely be a container query Bric.
Bootstrap 5.2.2 also has CSS vars, so equally, there is no technical reason that a Palette Bric could be built.
We can currently edit in Preview, of course — that’s what I spend most of my time doing (with the current stack editable in the HUD). I was frustrated that Isaiah removed the ability to tab from stack to stack in Preview in Stacks 5.0, especially when its new menu allows tabbing up and down the DOM with keyboard commands but only in Edit mode. I hope this will be fixed, and doesn‘t end up becoming a stubborn ‘this is how it should work’ issue. Likewise it would be nice if Stacks Pro had the option to show the current stack highlighted in Preview — it‘s annoying that it‘s possible to do this only in Edit mode (but that’s a RW thing). But these are quibbles.
The conclusion of this thread, for me, is that if an application works for your style of web development, stick with it. Blocs sounds as if it has lots of cool features, but for me the most important thing about RW/Stacks is the range of stacks I have available to me, the time I’ve spent learning how to use them, and the fact that they’re already paid for. I‘m sure the equivalent applies to the users of other platforms. As for where things are going, well, here we‘ve all been very focused on last year’s hiatus. But that‘s really just a local manifestation of something that seems to be happening across the whole area of commercial software development: markets are shrinking, getting investment is tougher, users are buying less new stuff. We‘re entering an era of ‘mend and make-do’. To my mind those user communities best able to adapt to that have the best chance of surviving.
Blocs 5.1 is now released after a long public beta testing phase. Good to see so much community interaction in how Blocs is being continually developed and tested.
There certainly is. The Blocs UI is at the top of the food chain and the abillity to use voice commands, has taken that to another level, and AFAIK, is the first in the web creation App arena delivering a usable ChatGPT integration.
While waiting on @isaiah and the inevitable release of StacksPro, I was notified today of what looks like a pretty good deal on Blocs, which has been the occasional topic for discussion here.
Just picked it up. For that money, kinda mad not too! I should say though that the Bundlehunt checkout is super flakey. I took several attempts to process, then changed me twice (I’ll get it back via my card.)
Not sure when I’ll get time to have a play with it, but hopefully somtime soon.
Does anyone make templates for Blocs 5? Be worth getting one or two to deconstruct and get my head around it.
Oh, and only other comment… It seems a licence is limited to one machine. Fair enough when you’re only paying €20, but feels a bit tight if you buy it at full price. Who works on just one machine nowadays?
