Funny. After watching your previous Dev Diary and then playing some more with the beta I had some reactions that tie into the feedback you’ve been getting.
First, no worries: I’m pretty sure that those that have gone so far as get the beta clearly see the potential here. I showed it to a designer friend and what it could do and he was “wow!” It’s just not done yet, and everyone, including myself, is a bit impatient, as we have sites to design. It’s not helping me that the product I’ve used for my sites can’t make it past Monterey, thus I’m in the quandary of running virtual macOS inside of macOS ;~(.
Others mentioned the linking, and you mentioned the “not sure about Markdown”, so I’ll add my feedback there: direct is better because that’s Elements in a nutshell. If I drop Markdown from the clipboard or other app on a Paragraph, then my expectation is not to see and edit Markdown, but to have that fully rendered and editable. I’m not expecting to type Markdown into Elements.
However, I want to make one comment that you might not react well to. Elements right now is all about design, and not particularly functional for a working site that is constantly expanding in breadth and depth. In other words, I see you putting lots of effort into making it a better designer, but for it to really work in the market as I think you hope it will, it also has to be an excellent production tool, making the day-to-day running of a site better.
Two things came to mind about this. First is that + icon that reappeared in the Pages panel. In a running Web site I don’t want a blank page and then have to rebuild all the site identity onto it, even if I can shortcut that with Globals. What I want when I click + is a list of pages I’ve predesigned that are ready to go (with Lorem epsom text in the heads/body). My sites have articles, data pages, reviews, tutorials, and a handful of other page types. I want to create one of those, not a blank page.
Likewise, the current way the Pages panel works is that I have to manually type in the folder/name info. I really want that inherited from the structure. And when things move in the structure (and they will as the site expands, because you can’t just go deep or go wide, you have to manage both in a complex site) all the links/folders/names need to automatically follow my dragging and dropping.
Again, it’s not design things I’m worried about at this point. I’d say you’ve got that well under control, and my playing with AI and Tailwind shows me that design is really only going to be limited to my imagination.
Note that RapidWeaver Classic has both design and production issues that get in the way of a constantly mutating site, so you’re halfway there ;~).
I hope you don’t take this as criticism, per se, but rather some commentary on what I’d like to see.
| 
