Blocs Plus user here. I completely agree!
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I currently use Blocs Plus, Sparkle and Wordpress. All have pros and cons. But all are complete enough or have enough free plugins to make them work out of the box.
I suspect many users will not buy software that is going to carve up functionality to drive revenue. Give me the FULL product at a reasonable price or I’m not going to bother.
I don’t understand the discussion around Classic and Stacks and I’ve never liked the Classic/Stacks approach. Both seem more for the high end users.
Elements on the other hand appears to be a new product that “may” eventually replace Classic/Stacks. Global components and custom elements are not really new and without the basics like a form tool you can’t call Elements a complete product.
Elements looks like it has the potential to be a really great app but if I have to start buying components and plugins to gain functionality then I simply will not consider the product.
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As a user of the Total CMS product, I’m not a huge fan and would hope a built in feature would be better.
I’ve always found the RW image galleries to be weak and I’ve spent money on plug-ins to improve them. I asked a while back if there would be a masonry layout (fairly common and popular these days) and didn’t hear a response.
I don’t expect to get everything in an initial release but I work on the basis of “don’t ask, don’t get” so believe it’s worth raising. I’m far more likely to buy and test the product if a ‘roadmap’ led me to believe it will eventually support what I need.
If Realmac aren’t intending to add these sort of features and were to say "a full featured blog or photo gallery et al will require a plugin’ it gives users a better metric to determine its value.
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Hi, Website design software that doesn’t need add-ons simply doesn’t exist anymore (I’m barely exaggerating 
). The economic model of a once-and-for-all purchase is no longer viable today for companies that find themselves faced with free services (Affinity last example, I know, low blow 
). Here I ask again my question: how many of those who downloaded add-on offered for free with a donation option gave? Only companies that do not aim to last more than a few years attempt the adventure. In fact the “cake” of potential buyers has been divided into too many parts due to the arrival of too many companies, most of which take a short tour and then leave. Concerning RW/Stacks the time saving for professionals is staggering (was if we consider relume… Not entirely accurate but honestly I don’t really care, I’m being honest 
). Nothing that is proposed is generally very complicated to produce with a notebook like textedit or emacs (HTML, CSS, PHP, Java, JQuery… not very complicated, you just need a little memory, 1 megabyte was enough after all 
) but very time consuming. Hence their interest even for developers. You’re right, Elements looks very good, if only with its Wysywyg, but I think its real potential lies in the additions from third-party developers. Realmac is an excellent team but, without significant and extremely rapid progress in human cloning, I doubt that they will be able to meet all our needs at once. To conclude this long post, I notice that the frustration linked to waiting is starting to overflow, this is normal but not always very nice for developers at work. The subject of price is important but after all, we all want to pay as little as possible, some want to be paid to use, nothing new here. The discernment will be complete when the product is on sale: this is where we will each decide with our possibilities. Until then, let’s take the opportunity to work on our tolerance for frustration… I’m taking this opportunity again to offer my psychological services ethically 
and with high deontology 
: no guaranteed results, payment in advance, no refund nope 
I agree with you that the platform needs to have a robust add-on capability. However, I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest something off the wall (at the risk of this post being moved.)
Here it goes…
GenAI components for elements. You would feed the AI available to Elements (however Realmac chooses to do that) and create HTML/Javascript/CSS/Python components as you need them. These AI-created components can be saved and shared between projects or the world.
I think the biggest challenge is going to be whether if it is possible to create UI controls for these special block.
For simplicity, they are little more than code components that you specifically target for code generated by the AI. However, the reality is that a good implementation will have multiple levels of AI components primed for different functions. If you don’t understand this ping me and I’ll explain further.
Back on topic, I would pay $200-$250 for this…not annually mind you.
I think that Elements is too far along to turn it into what I think is going to be needed for even a relatively decent period of time. But here is where agile development and small companies that can change direction quickly will have advantages over larger organizations.
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It’s true. I’ve already started to get lazy and ask Chatgpt for lines of code that I was recently doing alone in front of my editor without asking any questions. The AI revolution is very fast, in fact I don’t remember such a rapid change in anything before. Having the possibilities you describe in Elements would be great. I don’t mind a subscription model, the notion of price is simple for me: either I can or I can’t afford it. I never liked discussing prices. I often have patients who do it because other psychologists have accepted it. I did it at the beginning… ha it hurts… already 28 years ago but I quickly stopped. In the end, he was only disappointed. I think Realmac’s survey on price should not have been. A new product that arrives while the old one lasts for a while still implies price continuity otherwise it’s a mess. We can see it clearly here. Okay enough philosophizing, we want AI in Elements with a blog, forms, CMS and Email. Nah! 
Oh and also an appointment making module for online video consultation for a psychologist’s office with online payment as well. Nah again. 
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tldr;
You need to come up with a very snappy and decent price of around $60 to convince me (and others) to stay with Realmac until you have a competitive product established and perhaps $99 for new users.
To be honest, @dan and team. I can’t migrate existing projects, and if I have to recreate them from scratch, I am looking into other, similar or better priced, solutions that are already on the market. I am a Wappler user, too, and Blocs and Pinegrow also do a decent job.
I have been a long-time customer of RW, around version 3 or so, but I think it’s time to leave. I will keep RW Classic running as long as I can until the Stacks Eco System dies.
(By the way, I agree with some others who said to call it just “Elements” and not “RapidWeaver Elements” as this is misleading, it’s not RapidWeaver)
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We’re absolutely aware of this, and the feedback from everyone has been invaluable. We’ve changed our pricing plans to something I think everyone will be happy with🤞
Keep the feedback coming, you guys rock 
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Excited to see what you have come up with.
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Enough ! Where is the CTA ?
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Hey @Bruno,
Haha, while we would love to ship Elements today, it’s just not ready yet…
We’re working as fast as we can towards an alpha release so at least you guys can have a play. Stay tuned.
Cheers,
Dan
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No problem, tomorrow is fine
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Oh I was hoping later this evening so I had a nice new toy to play with.
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Haha, sorry about that!
However, we will be back to our regular schedule tomorrow with a new dev diary video, so at least there’s that to look forward to 
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Ok we’re tomorrow now… how about showing a CTA Buying/subscribing/Whateveryouwantbutwefinallygetit2playwith button build in your video and put it online so we could try it ?
I wonder if there isn’t a case to be made for a 3 tier payment structure:
Professional: unlimited websites + premium support
Hobbyist: up to 5 websites
Single Business: 1 website
Not sure how hard this would be to implement but it only seems fair to get a greater contribution from those of us who use the same tools to build and sell multiple sites.
This aside, getting people to transition when they have already invested heavily in Stacks will be difficult if the price is too high - particularly when potential critical functionality is still to be added by 3rd parties - e.g. a CMS, e-commerce and and complex forms.
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We did discuss this and it was an idea at one point. However we’re now thinking a single low subscription price point for access to all the features in Elements will be a better option to grow the user base.
Yes, I totally understand this point of view. However, we think once people have used Elements and the WYSIWYG editor, there’s no going back. There’s going to be huge demand for third-party addons to fill the gaps, and we know some entrepreneurial developers will happily fill those gaps. The future is going to be very exciting!
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My only question is this. I have spent thousands of dollars buying all kinds of stacks. Explain to me why I wouldn’t abandon everything that I have paid for and re-purchase a RapidWeaver where I can’t use stacks.
I don’t use Stacks so I can’t say much. Perhaps I can answer by explaining my thought process.
- Elements is WYSIWYG
- Elements outputs really clean code. No random
<divs>unless you want them. - It’s modern and fast
- It’s powerful right out of the box
- AI understands TailwindCSS and be can used with Elements to create really powerful stuff.
- Elements is simple or sophisticated, whatever you need.
- The team is more than one person strong so little risk of a sickness or injury hurting development or support.
- The future is bright.
There will be more reasons, but mostly it just looks like fun to work with.
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You don’t have to abandon what you already have, you can continue using RapidWeaver Classic and Stacks for many years to come. At some point in the future you want to start a new website or if you like the look of the way Elements does things, you can give it a try. There’s no pressure.
For me personally, I love the WYSIWYG editor, the ease of using the Theme Studio to control styles, creating re-usable custom components, the powerful globals feature, and the local data store (we’ll show this off soon). All of this and more makes building websites with Elements a pleasure.
I hope once you get to use Elements, it’ll all click and you’ll understand what all fuss is about and why we think it’s the future of building websites on the Mac.
In summary, the good news is everyone can pick and choose between the two versions of RapidWeaver and use what they feel comfortable with. We’re certainly not going to force anyone to upgrade or cross-grade to Elements. We plan to support both versions of RapidWeaver going forward.
Hope that helps!
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