I’m wondering if anyone out there has done some design work with Blocs 4? It seems like it has continued to develop nicely … but this is only an outsiders perspective.
It would be particularly useful to hear any pros/cons of Blocs relative to RW.
Thanks in advance for any insights folks can provide.
Previously, I had bought Blocs 3 but never used it.
This year, I bought Blocs 4 as well as Eldar’s training videos. The jury, in my estimation, is mixed. There were certain aspects of Blocs that were infinitely more elegant and intuitive than RW, but there were other aspects that should have been easy, but were in fact way more clumsy, way more difficult, and which required an unseemly and inordinate amount of coding.
I also found Blocs Customer Support to be somewhat temperamental. I was informed on one occasion that what I was asking assistance for, a simple enough procedure on RW but seemingly impossible for me with Blocs, was beyond the tech’s pay grade and inclination to respond. This left a very sour taste in my mouth.
I reverted to the known craziness of RW.
I used Blocs 3 for a while. After a learning curve, I really liked it. I even had a few templates for sale for Blocs, which sold “OK”.
It’s very different to use to RW, but after a while, I found it far more intuitive to use in terms of “the right way” to build out a website. I said at the time for a lot of RW users who want to build fairly simply websites it was a better option than RW. In the end, stopped with it as it lacked the stacks eco-system that RW has/had.
I always found the support excellent.
@IvoryBlack and @TemplateRepo Thanks for both of your inputs. This is all very good to know.
Without thinking about it consciously … being able to replicate those aspects of the Stacks eco-system that I use would be of primary importance. Hmm … it seems for me that WordPress will remain my #2 development tool: it really has improved a lot in the past few years.
The weakness of RW, Blocs, and Stacks for me has always been the single developer model. Something goes wrong with one of them then the whole thing crashes down.
But WP is no different, it has a load of third party devs who make all the fancy stuff, no?
Blocs suffers less from this though it you just want to make fairly simple sites, as it can all be done with the default tools, so need no addons.
Maybe also get a look at Pinegrow. I really like it. You can drop in various templates to get you started, or just build from scratch using the pre-built elements (drag and drop) or just codde it all yourself.
I dpn’t do a huge amount in the website arena now, maybe half a dozen client sites this year, I’ve moved into a new area with my main business. But, if websites still figured highly, I’d be putting my learning time in to Pinegrow, not another system like RW/Blocs etc. And certainly not WP! I spent a month this year “learning it”, and hated everything about it! Horses for courses.
I spent some time time using Blocs3 and also RW/Stacks with Foundry, and I was very impressed with how slick the whole Blocs experience was. What I found was that trying to use 2 became difficult switching between the 2 and frustrating because each one had strengths and I would often feel that I wish RW could do what Blocs could do and vice versa.
What changed for me was when Source was released in Aug 2019 and I was finally able to do everything I wanted to do with RW/Stacks/Source, and stopped using Blocs and others. I now pretty much do everything with just Source and a handful of stacks.
I do keep an eye on Blocs (now Blocs4) and it has grown in focussed leaps and bounds while RW has just stagnated with nothing new happening for years. As frustrating as that is however, for me, RW7 is nothing but a front end to Stacks and by using the right stacks it works well enough. All the current development for RW is coming from just a few smart Stacks developers. In a way this negates the single developer dependency of RW because there is no ongoing development that we can see other than keeping up with new versions of macOS. RW’s dependency is Stacks, so as long as Isaiah, Stuart and Norm don’t get on the same flight, we should be OK.
The new feature that Blocs4 can create a Wordpress template may draw me back into blocs when I next need a WP solution, but at that point I would evaluate Blocks against Elementor or whatever WP system I need to gain access to. Also the video based Blocs Academy is amazing and shows what can be done when you work hard at something.
If you are a seasoned RW Stacks user having invested $100’s in expensive frameworks and stacks and then invested the time to learn how to use RW, then Blocs or using any other Web App will mean throwing away all the RW stuff and relearning everything.
If you are new to building web sites then RW would be a very hard sell over Blocs4 especially with the quality of help in Blocs. Blocs has everything needed to build a modern website without any further purchases.
What’s “Source”? Not heard of it before.
Thanks for all the responses. I believe I’ve heard about PineGrow before but will look into it a bit more.
To be fair, currently I’m completely happy with my setup: RW, Foundry (with add-on packs), Repository, and a few other stacks. I create course websites and the combo all works great.
But I’ll have a bit more free time starting in January and I figure it’s always useful to explore alternative approaches just in case.
It would be great to hear which tasks you found troublesome when using Blocs.
Also apologies if you didn’t get a reply, I reply to most tech questions but occasionally some of my reply’s bounce and don’t get through.
I hope it’s okay to reignite this thread.
Looking at what’s happening with Stacks and RW, I think for many of us, Blocs is very much back in the frame. My website is on Foundation 1 and could probably do with a refresh.
I’ve been really impressed with Source and in particular, some of the work that @Webdeersign has been producing, but certainly it’s looking like a modest investment of time and money to bring things up to date.
The main benefit to Rapidweaver seemed to be the stack community, but that looks like it will be a separate entity moving forward.
In 2022, what are the main reasons you’ll be staying with RW/Stacksapp?
For me there are two reasons:
me too.
I used Blocs for a while, even made a couple of commecial sites with it, and was really pleased with it (Blocs).
At the time, maybe one or even two versions ago, it was lacking a good bit when compared to RW, but that’s to be expected as it is/was much younger. And I’m not talking about lacking in terms of Stack but some of the core features. That said, I said at the time for people looking to make simple drag and drop sites, to use it over RW was a no-brainer; far cheaper entry and ablw to do way more out of the box. I don’t doubt that things have only improved since then as it’s had at least one new version.
But what of Blocs once RW becomes it’s own stand-alone app? This is a total unknown, as we know next to nothing about RW v9, only that it won’t work with stacks, so until we have a lot more info on that one it’s impossible to comment.
But, if the RM boys get their act together, and launch RW9 with a great range of Elements built in, along with (at least) the core functionality of RW8, and asuming Elements takes off and devs start to make them, then it’ll be a winner, and might even start to take back some of the business it’s lost to Blocs over the years. Might. There are so many unknowns and variables at this point, it’s impossible to really have an opinion. For sure, I’d say the market is there waiting for them to enter, it’s just a case of how well they enter it.
Familiarity. Unless RW v9 is a total abortion, I’ll be staying with it. I will of course go the Stacks App route too, but I won’t be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If there is a market for both I’ll also be producing templates for both.
When RW8 appear about 4 years ago, I spent a few months trying out Pinegrow, BootstrapStudio and Blocs and came to the conclusion that Blocs was the clear winner for me. I set about working with Blocs and RW, but found that it was a bigger challenge than I expected, to work with 2 very different Apps. It was a constant source of frustration where I was always looking for a feature in one which the other one had and vice versa. So I decided to work only with RW7 + Stacks and keep Blocs on the back burner as my escape plan. This decision was based on my money and time invested in Stacks, having to maintain many sites built with RW + Stacks, and also the friendly knowledgeable Stacks help available on this forum. 4 years on, Blocs is now razor sharp and has had continuous development and now has a growing add-on capability and of course can run on an iPad.
However, when SOURCE was released over 2 years ago, RW7 + Stacks + SOURCE was a game changer and finally I could build whatever I wanted, that was both quick in Edit and on a live site.
At this point we know nothing really about RW9 except for the icon design, and based on the outcry over that last 2 weeks, I would say it’s safe to say that a major rethink is needed for RW to move forward. I predict , based on past performance, RW9 will not appear until well into next year, in a usable form.
So we don’t need to do anything and this was exactly the same position 3 years ago, 2 years ago, etc., when we had no idea what would happen with RW.
Stacks App is however, genuinley very exciting in terms of Isaiah taking control of his IP, his expertise, how the limitations and lack of API development within RW can be cast aside and how so many new possibilities will be opened up.
So in summary, keep Blocs in the emergency grab bag, continue using RW as it is today with Stacks 4, and then sit back and wait until Stacks App is released.
That’s reassuring - thanks for your reply. I’ve been advised that Foundation 1 may stop working this year, so I need to redo my website (probably around 100 pages - aghhhh) in Source in order to keep afloat.
Not looking forward to it, but I can hopefully increase my page scores!
Why should this stop working?
I had this reply on my thread (where you corrected my spelling of ‘Volt’) on the Blocsapp forum:
I have had to rebuild all my old RW sites in Blocs with just one remaining to complete. This was because they were done with Foundation 1, which doesn’t support PHP 8 or later.
When PHP 7.4 is no longer supported later this year the contact forms will either become useless or at best insecure until the websites are replaced. Those websites built with Foundation 1 are all on borrowed time, as far as I can tell and some are not that old. Given there was no easy or inexpensive path to continue with RW I’ve just rebuilt them all in Blocs.
PHP 7.4 will still work, it’s just it won’t receive any security updates anymore.