Over the past few days we’ve been busy inviting new users to the Elements beta. After years of work, it feels like we’re rapidly approaching the finish line for the initial release…
In today’s video I talk about how we’re expanding the beta, and the awesome Column component that @upssjw has been working on this past week!
Your feedback makes the product better.
We’re listening to all your feedback and working super hard to make Elements the perfect website builder.
Ok where can I order a CMS with blog, a cookie consent component and a FAQ one with SEO_AEO optimization, Christmas is coming, mean Santa Dan? Yeah I know I leave
I am feeling a bit unease about this sentence to be honest. There are so many things currently missing in Elements that I do not see the initial release within 3 or 4 months. I am not talking about a Blogging system or a cookie consent component but you have once said that Elements is meant to be the best static offline website builder on the Mac.
Hmmm, we currently have 12 Elements available (some still in development - like Gallery). That would be a bit thin for the best offline website builder. Currently only very basic websites are possible.
Having a look outside of the Rapidweaver Elements universe, my Foundry 3 has or shall I say had more than 60 “Elements”. Looking at Elementor for Wordpress they have even in the free version around 40 Widgets and the paid Pro Version over 90.
Don’t get me wrong I really like Elements and I really love the open way it is developed but if we end at the initial release with 15 or so ready made Elements that would not fulfill my expectations.
@dan just got home from work and seen this, excellent sharing a component in progress. Few more features to add but almost there. Just need to create a complete component to beable to share as an open editable component like this and eventually make a proper custom component, will be free of course.
Thanks again for sharing nice to see what I have learned so far shown to others, what can be achieved with a small amount of Tailwind code and of course the power of Elements, it is addictive once you start delving into custom components.
Downloading by others get feedback and and any issues always welcome
I can only agree. Dan’s videos are incredibly inspiring. At first, I thought this wouldn’t be for me. I have absolutely no knowledge of any coding language. But with the help of AI, I started creating simple things myself.
That’s why I’d like to share this accordion custom component. The only thing that isn’t working yet is the open/close switch. The other features should work fine. Anyone who wants to can continue tinkering with it and make changes.
Dan, I’m a former user of Rapidweaver and have enjoyed watching the development of Elements and anxiously await its release.
However, I’ve also been visiting the Webflow site to learn about building websites with that tool. So, I’ve had lots of time to compare the two website building tools. Based on my own use case, an argument could be made for using either app. The jury is still out but I’m looking forward to the day I can use both to test which one works best for me.
I just watched Ep. 48 of Dev Diary and one thing jumps out at me. I would prefer to have the ability to lock body text to a baseline reference. Not having that ability will often result in what I refer to as “the jitters,” baselines that jump up and down across columns. This type of layout, as you said, is really reminiscent of print layout for magazines and newspapers…not web layout. I’m not sure how this columns feature would easily translate to a responsive web layout but if you add it, I’m sure that some people will use it, whether it’s a “best practice” or not.
Perhaps, I’m just not seeing the possibilities for using this columns feature in a responsive layout. I’m certainly open to being educated on the subject; I’m a long way from being the world’s leading authority on web design.
Gallery is now pretty much complete, look out for it in the next beta. We also have a few more Components to add as we know we have a few gaps to plug
I think the difference with Elements VS Foundry is we’ve gone lower level. The Components we’ve built are VERY flexible and powerful, they allow you to build just about any layout you want as we’re working closer to the bare metal - we’re exposing more of the available CSS properties in Tailwind. No need for a card component, as it’s really easy to make out of a Container…
…No need for a separate “Overlap” stack as our Components have controls to set an offset. No need for a “Background” Stack as the Container Component can do it. No need for a “Spacing” stack as all our components can set spacing. No Need for a “Max Width” stack as all of our components can set it. No need for an HTML stack as we have Custom Components, the list goes on, and on…
So while it might appear we have less “stacks” it actually turns out Elements can do so much more with less, and do it in a more direct and elegant way.
Having said all of that, I do want to know what we’re missing, so we can make sure we meet your needs
Glad to hear you really Love Elements, please do let us know what you need and we’ll do our best to get it added (it might already be on our list or in the works), I’m keen to see some of the template projects you’re working on!
hi I just used the tailwind Columns ’ t-shirt’ ( scale is the same as the [max-width] responsive) class, it also has 1-12 column settings, but also added is the option to change these with Elements options to change these settings per screen size by selecting the blue dots, you can also select px widths at different widths for different screen sizes using the blue dots, so not inventing anything just using tailwind and css classes.
Its just an extra option anyone can use
I have never used columns in web design and probably will not, it was just an exercise to show how easy it is to make your own components, and if anyone would like to use it, it is free, as Dan said a few people have asked about columns
There are still missing pieces that I would consider core as well, such as ANCHORS. The site I’m building in Elements will never be able to be finished without support for anchors. Or it will have to undergo a radical redesign
But the most worrisome missing piece for me is handling all the pain to do with cookies and privacy. There is nothing like this on the horizon, which means I’ll be forced to use one of the paid solutions like Iubenda or Cookie Monster. These will work as they are just code that can be embedded into an HTML component. But they are not cheap and you have to buy them for each website. Get more expensive than the sites earn very quickly.
I have asked this question before and never got an answer from the RM team.
Can we get a list of the components that are planned for the first release of Elements?
This would go a long way towards reducing my anxiety that I’m investing all this time into Elements but might end up not being able to publish due to missing functionality.
@dan agreed on the part you can do a lot more with the existing Elements as they are extremely flexible and powerful. I admit, my statement with over 60 Stacks in Foundry 3 was a bit provocative but between the current 12 Elements and my 60 the truth is probably somewhere in the middle .
Anyhow, I sat down for a while and thought about what I would expect from my new website builder. It is what I would like to see. Others may have a total different view. The list is divided into “Must”, “Should” and “Nice to Have”. See it as food for thought. I am also aware that some of my wishes you can replicate with the available Elements or you can build them with AI and Custom Elements. But I would like them ready made to concentrate on my design and not copying code around.
Must Have
Slider
Anchor
Audio Player
Video Player
Contact Form - highly customizable e.g. only one field (mail) with send button
Modals
Accordion (horizontal and vertical)
Off-Canvas
Should Have
Dropdown menu of links
Badge
Captions
Progress bar
Quotes
YouTube/Vimeo Player
Table
Breadcrumb
Sidemenu
Megamenu
Icon List
Kinetic (one of my favourite Foundry 3 Stacks!!!) not necessary but great
Content Filter
Nice to Have
Button Group
Definition List (see Foundry 3)
Dot Leaders (see Foundry 3)
Footer Info (see Foundry 3)
Pagination (see Foundry 3)
Pin (see Foundry 3)
Partitions (what a timesaver for some projects!)
Slipstream (see Foundry 3)
Scroll to
Popup Nav
Warning/Alert
Star rating
Call to Action
Instagramm Feed - also other feeds from popular social media channels
Animated counter
General Stuff
Cookie and Privacy handling - I could live also with a separate Realmac solution at extra purchase
CMS/Blogging - I could live also with a separate Realmac solution at extra purchase
Connection or solution for integrating Icons e.g. via FontAwsome etc.
Possibility to integrate notes to each Element - To integrate instructions for 3rd party stuff
Page transition effects
Puuuh that wa a long one. Hope you find it helpful
I think for most of us, this is true. The core should be absolutely solid. Because the competition has an absolutely solid base of features. We would rather pay a “few” to not have to mess with code if we can avoid it. Drag and drop will always be faster than multiple “paste” of text into various areas, plus debugging.
As far as the list. I will leave it alone. It’s subjective to the user as you said.
My take away is this: What is best for Realmac? They must have a competitive product. They must sell it for a price that insures future R&D and a profit to reward the risk.
I will say this: as someone who has been in business for most of my life, it is not uncommon to get caught up in the excitement of seeing a dream become a reality and lose sight of the forest while standing in the middle of the trees.
With Blocs 6 coming soon the disparity and uniqueness of Elements is partially fading. Dan is very knowledgeable about what the competition is. He has said he has a list of feature requests. So hopefully his vision is clear.
It is always hard to filter the “need” from the “want,” and even harder to determine if a “want” has enough demand to become a “need.”
Totally agree with you @Flash . I am also now 20 years in Marketing and the difficulty is always to translate the customers needs, wants and what they say into a vision or a product.
So our part in the beta test as I see it, is to tell the developer team what we feel and want and they translate it into a product. I like the open way of the development and sometimes @dan got relative harsh feedbacks. Probably not always easy to swallow. But at the end it will help to have a great product which generates good revenues for RM and that helps to develop the product further.
While I’ve stopped using Elements (at least for now) I do think that the direction @dan and the team have taken with the base elements is solid (although I still think that the inspector is a UX nightmare, and the Typography element is half-baked). Having a small set of very flexible core elements provides users with the ability to solve many of their individual needs by themselves, and when combined with custom components should enable users to accomplish almost anything they can imagine using Elements. Unfortunately, any component behaviour (beyond hover) can only be defined using custom components (and JS), which makes anything requiring interactivity much more difficult for those folks preferring a WYSIWYG editor to create.
I say ‘almost anything’, as while copy/pasting code from the internet, an AI, etc might seem like a win, I fear in the long-term having a culture of generating/copy/pasting found code into Elements custom components will introduce far more complexity than needed. It might work today when there are but a few custom components, but it’s a blunt force solution that will likely cause more problems than it solves in time — especially as more custom components and generated/copy/paste code are added.
For me, the reality of Elements as it stands came down to that if I need to write code to accomplish more complex designs and interactions using Elements, then I might as well just write code in a proper text editor using a simple framework such as 11ty, as I’m better able to manage the complexity myself, rather than having an app ‘automagically’ try to abstract it away.
Of course, I do miss the WYSIWYG aspect I was really hoping would become a part of my workflow, but at least I’ve got the peace of mind that my work is future-proof, and unlikely to break as additional components are added. YMMV.
I’ll continue to keep an eye on Elements as it’s not even reached v1 yet, and hopefully many of my concerns will be addressed (or simply be non-issues) in time. I love the idea behind Elements, but I’m not convinced that the current implementation and design of the app is anywhere near that idea, yet—especially in terms of a ‘modern web design tool’ when compared with the competition.
Again, I’ve got thousands of pages, that have probably millions of words in them. I’m not seeing how I can have a component that sits as the main element in my pages where I can mix images, text, lists, anchors, headings, etc (basically all the Markdown stuff). So far we can have text/headings. To do the others means creating another container and that’s a hassle as it means "create some text, add a container after it, put image/whatever in it, add another text container, etc.
I was interested to see some of the previews for the next version of Blocs 6, they clearly have been following what is being done in Elements as there are a number of new features straight out of the Elements playbook.
I have used Blocs in the past and it is a good solution, although I found it more cumbersome to use than Elements. But is has a much more complete set of components and everything needed to build a modern site.
Will be interesting to compare the two when Blocs 6 is released.
@WeaverPixel Okay, that is an excellent list. Thanks for taking the time to put it together.
I spent a hour or so this afternoon going through your list with @bon and we talked through each one, they basically fell into a few categories:
Yes, it’s on the list to add
Not required, You can build it with the built-in components
Yes, we’d like to do it one day, but not for the 1.0 launch
No, we think it’s better left for a third party
This discussion (and your list) is really long so I think I’ll start a new post (tomorrow) covering our answers on each component as I know a lot of beta testers will be keen to see the list.
but between the current 12 Elements and my 60 the truth is probably somewhere in the middle