Blocs Chat

I’m not here to defend Norm or the price, but I think it’s perfectly reasonable. A good price even.

When I learnt to use it in anger early last year I quickly formed the opinion that Blocs is a much better tool for an awful lot of RW users. In that it can do pretty much everything lots of users need, out of the box. No need for additional purchases. That still stands IMO. It’s not for me, not in the commercial environment, at least 3 wasn’t, but for many I reckon it’s a better fit.

Cost of “freeform” entry into RW is what? £300? The entire Bloc’s setup is still half that.

I know you quantified your comment with the “for me” bit, but for the sake of taking the higher ground, I’m ignoring that ;-)

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$49.99 is upgrade from blocs v3 here’s how.

Is that the method you are using to get the upgrade pricing?

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yep, I was upgrading from Blocs 3 via the licence upgrade system you have setup

You seem to be getting soft in your old age…

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Just exhausted.

I’ll be back to the hard nosed arrogant f**ker in Jan ;-)

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7 posts were split to a new topic: VAT MOSS - VAT on digital product sales

@Norm I compliment you for your marketing On Wordpress theming I do agree, it’s a different animal. From a prospect point of view I don’t think SEO is “plus”, but a basic requirement.
That said, If I hadn’t invested deeply in RW (not just money, but rather time), Blocs v4 Plus would be a no brainer.

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Im in the UK and I just checked the cost using the in app upgrade button. The price is calculating fine here. So thats $114 for Blocs v4 and the Plus features.

SEO features exist in Blocs, this additional feature is just an extra to make improving SEO easier and faster.

Ah thats great to hear. Well you know where we are if you change your mind :)

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Yeah thats not using the in app Blocs v3 upgrade options you need Blocs v3 for that.

Thats the new user discount.

Full ack.

Loving all your perspectives on Blocs! and I too noticed the Black Friday v4.0 deal and have been tempted.

One big reason for me to jump on it would be platform support for Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP. So far I have used Mobrise to build AMP sites for a couple customers so far that demanded this when Google seemed to had gone all-in for the framework, and at the time was biasing SERPs heavily towards AMP sites. Anyhow, those projects came and went, and so did the customers, and I didn’t rack up demand so I stopped paying subscription. I know it’s an option should a new project arises.

The point on this preamble is that that what always struck me about Blocs is that it has very similar approach to Mobrise’s “content blocks” paradigm. And I know from past RW forums posts I’ve seen, that AMP compliant HTML output is somewhat of an unsurmountable challenge for RW+Stacks simply because of the way they generate code.

So my question to this thread is:

Do you see Blocs sometime in the future supporting things such as AMP and PWA? Although it seems to not be listed among Bocs’ specs/features? And is it still the case that you know, that AMP sites SERP berter? Now that PWAs are Google’s latest darlings, (it seems…) Oh and: How do they relate, anyway?

Thanks!

I have only just begun to play with the Blocs 4 trial. There is a simple, visual elegance to the interface that is very pleasing. Nevertheless, after several hours of messing around, watching the first of Eldar’s videos, I confess that there are already several aspects to the software that I find very confounding:

  1. It appears that you cannot open more than one file at the same time.
  2. Unbelievably, I cannot seem to change the Home page to the HOME page (I like a menu in caps. There is an attractive symmetry to the type that way.)
  3. Most distressingly, there is no gallery bric that I am aware of. There is only a carousel which is really a very poor substitute, with limited and rather ungainly transitions.

It seems that as unruly as Rapidweaver has become, it nevertheless seems to offer more sophisticated and subtle control of the graphic elements, particularly among the offerings of certain third party developers.

I may be wrong, I may be missing something, but these are my very initial observations.

I know this sucks, its bad form but its on my radar.

Aside from using classes to force them to upper case. You can also use the Menu Manager to adjust the link title. The options in the page settings are for the file name and the SEO title.

change-title

  1. There is a Masonry Bric

I hope that helps.

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Maybe, the next big thing will be Bootstrap 5 support which Blocs v4 is already prepped for but the framework is still in being tested so more on that once it ships.

Google Amp is on it’s way out… It is no longer a ranking element for Google, and it was announced by Google that it is not required anymore for inclusion into the “Top Stories” carousel in search results. It has been basically replaced by “Page Experience” and the focus on “Core Web Vitals”

I’m going to be upgrading to Blocs 4 at some point - I use Blocs for quick brochure sites, and haven’t built anything new in Rapidweaver for almost 2 years. As was pointed out, the upgrade price includes everything you need, no need to buy things like new versions of “Stacks” which should always be considered when talking about Rapidweaver pricing… $69 to upgrade Rapidweaver to the latest version plus $50 to get the latest version of Stacks from Yourhead we are now at $120, quite a bit more than the upgrade price for Blocs which has far more power right out of the box.

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Blocs5 was released a couple of weeks ago and having spent a couple of weeks using it, would say and it is an absolute cracker of a web building App. The team at Blocs have also done a most impressive job on the new web site and the creation of the slickest of videos.

Based on Bootstrap 5.22, Blocs5 has a whole host of significant new features, and some features not seen anywhere else.

There is a focus on building faster and better web sites and you can now build a Blocs site that will achieve 100% in Lighthouse/PageSpeed.

New features include CSS Grid, built in Publishing that just works, easy to implement local Google fonts and auto generation of webP versions of all jpg images. Yes, auto generation of optimised webP versions of all jpg images with 1 checkbox tick! There is even a project stats feature that shows a load of useful project information, including how much time was spent on the project. Built in Templates and also a learning Academy accessible from Blocs5. Scroll based animations, background masks, page dividers and a custom colour management (picker). The list goes on and on.

Blocs4 was already fast compared to RW + Stacks, but Blocs5 is even faster in Preview, due to a lot of clever stuff going on to speed up Preview. E.g. the auto generation of image size attributes and optimised webP image generation, with generation of the fallback code, all happens in Publish, so that the Preview is faster.

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Hi, is there an upgrade price if I own blocs 3.5.x?

I don’t know about v3, but there is an upgrade from v4 for both Blocs and BlocsPlus.

Bear in mind that the Blocs5 price is a one off and not a yearly subscription.

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Blocs looks great — a bit like RW/Stacks might have looked if Skyler Knight had designed it. I love the idea of graphics features like gradients and masks built in to the app. But I’d be interested to hear what it‘s like to work with, and how easy it is to break out of the Blocs aesthetic. For me, it underlines why it is pointless for RW/Stacks to take on the ‘web-builder’ apps (on or offline). It’s a bit like Affinity trying to take on Canva, Figma or Sketch. In fact the beauty of RW/Stacks for me, right now, is its state of chaos. It’s an environment that can be hacked and subverted and used in ways that were never intended, which makes it very creative (but also not ‘simple to use’ or ‘out of the box’). What makes RW/Stacks powerful is the ability to make stacks. Every web-building app is going to provide access to CSS and HTML and maybe some JS in some form or another. Stacks, which is relatively light on the constraints it imposes, also allows integration of PHP scripts, React and Vue modules, rendering libraries like Three.js etc., and all the new stuff that browsers can do. Currently it‘s a great place to be integrating and building the tools one wants to use.

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