I know a few have looked at this - seems a bit of a no-brainer.
Any thoughts on it?
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Bargain. If you want to try Blocs. I bought it on a deal last year and after a few hours playing with it, it āclickedā with me. I ended up really liking it and plan to use it in anger at some point. I built a ādemoā project which I was rather pleased with: https://www.templaterepo.com/demos/designed/
From starting with Blocs to finishing that project took about a week, with anything from 3-6 hours a day at it. This obviously included learning Blocs from scratch.
There are some really nice touches to Blocs that most users will love. The way it handles layouts at breakpoints and classes is brilliant.
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I still have RW and use it to maintain a few older sites, however I have essentially switched to Blocs for all new projects and like it a lot. At that price itās an amazing bargain. @Jannis has recently created a very good CMS for Blocs called Volt and there is a lot more coming.
The biggest stumbling block I found was trying to use it like RW, which will cause frustration and you need to approach it with an open mind. Not necessarily better or worse, just different. You can take Blocs 3 by itself though and do an awful lot without needing any paid extras.
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Understatement of 2020 so far. Full price of Blocs 3 is amazing value considering how mature it is and what you get. You donāt need anything else such as Stacks or stacks or a framework to build beautiful sites. You could pay more for 1 stack!
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Ok, but now that I have RapidWeaver, what more do I get if I also buy Blocs?
Good question. I suppose a fall back if RW hits the crapper.
Nothing really. A different perspective perhaps. A different tool to do a similar job. A new learning experience. If you own RW and all the stacks/plugins you need to do what you want, then really there is no reason to get Blocs, unless you are curious.
I gave a bit of a running commentary on my first Blocs outing last year when I bought it. I said at the time I felt that Blocs was a far better purchase option nowadays for someone who wants to built simple ātemplate blockā sites. By that I mean that Blocs comes with a load of pre-built content blocks that you just drag to the page and populate, so there is little to no layout design needed. The user just needs to add colours and content and go.
Now, before the Blocs fanboys jump all over me, Iām . ot saying Blocs is only of use for simple sites. Once you dig deep itās pretty powerful, but for those wanting to build simple sites, itās a better option than RW IMO. Not least because one purchase of normally 99, now only 40, gets you everything you need. Whereas with RW you need RW, Stacks, then a loads of stacks and themes and/or a framework to get something usable.
RW shines when it comes to the sheer number of āaddonsā as the stacks ecosystem is extremely well established and the Blocs one much less so, but RW has about 15 years in the game and Blocs a couple, so itās unfair to compare on that front.
The other thing to maybe consider, although in truth I suspect itās some simple facts lost on most users: Blocs is faster to work with and typically produces cleaner/faster code than RW.
Unlikely. But you could level that at any one-man/small team services. If the main man if any small business gets hit by a bus the service will likely fold, but at least with RW there is a well-established ecosystem that could/would step in to keep the lights on.
But, looking to Blocs as a back-up to RW is doing Blocs an injustice. Itās a great tool for building websites with, just like RW, it just takes a different direction.
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I guess that sums it up pretty well. I probably donāt need it since Iām happy with my current setup, and I have the stacks I need. I AM curious though, so Iāll think about it for another couple of daysā¦
The rate of development seems to be much faster with Blocs, as does the level of support. I simply asked Realmac where I could download 7.5.6 eleven days ago and Iām still waiting for an answer. There have been times when I have made suggestions for features in Blocs and they have appeared within hours. In 2019 it added 150 new features and that was all within Blocs 3 without a major upgrade.
It will soon have the ability to export direct to Wordpress, which will be built in to the app. Again no need for extra paid plugins. If you are happy with RW then you can stick with it. In my case the main motivator for switching was down to speed of page previews in RW and since then options like Source have appeared that are much improved.
I do tend to find it tricky jumping back & forth between the two, not least because some of the keyboard short cuts do very different things. For example cmd + d duplicates an item in Blocs, but deletes the page in RW.
Overall I have no regrets and the point about relying on one person is valid, but then again Adobe stopped Muse recently and that was a subscription deal. If Blocs stopped development tomorrow I could still use it quite happily for the next couple of years while looking at alternatives.
People say that regards lots of software. But, if the software puts in a call home before launching, to maybe check licence numbers etc. and the person paying the the bills for the server that handles the requests stop paying the bills, the software will stop working.
Iām not for one second saying this is going to happen to either RW or Blocs, but to make the point that just because you have the software on your computer it doesnāt follow that you can continue to use it should the company that support it fold.
Forgot about the Wordpress feature. Would this essentially make it comparable to something like Oxygen (also on offer atm)?
That certainly never happened to me with Yummy after the developer died, however itās a good point and Iāll ask Norm. The software was purchased through Paddle and I donāt think they are likely to fold any time soon.
At this stage the details are yet to be finalised, but essentially I believe you would design your theme inside Blocs then export that to use in Wordpress. If you wanted to change the theme you could do that in Blocs, so in that sense yes I think it would be an alternative to something like Oxygen but without some of the downsides that tend to come with page builders.
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To my knowledge Yummy never put a call in to home on launch. At least, when I used it, I never saw a call in Little Snitch.
But hey, Iām not saying it will happen, only making the point made. And you might have a point about Paddle: I just launched Blocs, the only calls picked up my LS were to Google for fonts and Paddle.
You get the reassurance that you have a good RW exit strategy. Not much, if anything, is happening at RM as far as I can see, but as Ashley pointed out, there have been over 150 new features all within a point release, in the last 12 months yet no new features in RW8 for 18 months and somehow RW8 is now at 8.5. Should RW not work one day for an unforeseen but unfixed issue, you would have an alternative that you could quickly switch to. You get the attention of Norm (developer and 50% of the Blocs machine) who ardently answers customer support questions and is enthusiastic to engage with users making Blocs better every day. You also get free Brics (stacks in RW terms) almost weekly. You also get the reassurance that if Norm wants fruit and veg, he just goes to a shop and buys it, instead of growing it and using up his valuable programming time.
Blocs was certainly my exit strategy, but since Stacks4 and Source have been released, RW7 + S4 + Source is a real RW life extender and with care, the edit and preview performance in RW is acceptable. The fact that Source produces minuscule code is a further reason to use RW with Source. So I see RW7 as just a Page Maker for Stacks which gives me access to Source and a couple of other dev stacks.
Writing this makes me think that there should be some sort of restriction in place to stop Isaiah, Stuart, Tav and Jannis boarding a plane together, just in case.
There is a downside to having Blocs in that when you switch back to RW, you will feel like you are going back to a non WYSISYG interface from 2 decades ago and the switch does take some adjustment. Switching between both is interesting because you frequently do wish that you could have features in one app from the other app, and vice versa.
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We just planned a vacation trip together š
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I love this forum. I like the fact my death is up for discussion š¤£
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No, no. Just leave the source code somewhere obvious :-)
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@Webdeersign. Honestly thought I would give it a try (not a pro, do websites for fun/friends no remuneration involvedā¦and I spend way too much on RW!!), but good old UK and 20% VAT!! Not sure itās worth it?? Just for a play aboutā¦convince me why I should??
Itās not really the job of anybody to convince you why it might be worth switching to Blocs and there is always a free demo if you are merely curious. I make money out of using Blocs and it pays the mortgage every month, but if your chief objection to RW is the running cost, Blocs would be a huge improvement. As @Webdeersign pointed out you can pay more for a single stack.
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