Just found a RapidWeaver competitor (I guess)?
Looks interesting and just wondering if anybody’s had any experience with it.
WeaverKingdom has built some Stacks-like addons called Brics.
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I have had it for just under a year. It’s a good product and getting better all the time. It’s all bootstrap 3 under the hood. Next release will be Bootstrap 4. Blocs produce very clean code; it has no FTP built in, so you do need an FTP client, most already have one, if not there are free ones available. Norm just added the ability for 3rd parties to make Bric’s like WeaverKingdom has done. It’s kind of like a RapidWeaver with stacks built in for $79.
It’s doesn’t yet have the quantity/variety of add-ons that RW offers. It has a free trial if you want to check it out.
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Charlie Lockheart (Blueball Freestack) has just rebuilt his own site with this I believe.
Both are similar apps obviously. Blocs is shaping really nice, but when comparing both RapidWeaver is a much more mature app and version 8 is going to be an amazing update.
Under the hood Blocs is tied with Bootstrap which is great, but on the other hand RapidWeaver can also be used with Foundation, UIkit and other framewoks.
The built-in FTP client of RapidWeaver works amazingly great and it’s something I miss in Blocs too. Norm (Blocs developer) is very helpful adding features as we third-party developers ask, but the custom add-ons (or custom brics in Blocs) API is in early stages and far to be comparable to Stacks.
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I briefly played around with it. The thing that was immediately noticeable was the live preview and how speedy it is to make changes and see them happening without the screen refreshing. It has a nice interface and I could see it being very user-friendly, but it is a different workflow than RW and it took some getting used to and I just haven’t had time to learn it…
If you’re coming from the world of Foundation/Foundry and BWD stacks, I could see Blocs feeling a bit constraining but, as others have said, it’s much newer so they’re still developing it. When I was playing with it, the 3rd party Brics weren’t available yet so I’m sure it’s grown quite a bit.
Agree 100%. The live preview is almost instantaneously. Norm the developer also makes a Mac app($29) called Solis that gives you live preview on multiple screen sizes simultaneously. It’s pretty cool, and works with a lot of web development platforms including RapidWeaver. Although RapidWeaver has to regenerate the site(like preview in the browsers) so its sluggish. On bloc’s and code editors like VSCode or brackets
Solis is very fast
The 3rd party brics just came out of beta maybe two months ago, so it’s just starting. You do get quite a lot of brics (like stacks) with the base product.
Blocs is a fine product… there is an endless amount of choices in this arena now. I think switching products may be a good idea depending on several factors. How much you have invested in rapidWeaver and the addons is probably the main one for me.
Most competing products offer a trial period. I have stuck with Rapidweaver myself. I am hoping 8 is going to be a meaningful upgrade. Time will tell…
@labcoatguy Blocs is now a mature, lightening quick and very capable web creation tool that is being developed at a great rate of knots in the UK. I believe Blocs3 will be available later this year.
To judge for yourself here are 3 sites built with the core $79 Blocs App and no additional add-ons:
https://www.wilkinsrock.com/index.html
http://www.mundobuilders.com/index.html
Remember that these 3 sites are not rigid structure Themes, but they are freeform sites that you create and position whatever you want wherever you want it.
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What about blog/CMS and commerce capability?
I think that Blocs only has 4 CMS solutions built into the core product - (free) October CMS, PulseCMS with blog, CushyCMS and SurrealCMS. Although I might be wrong and there may be more now.
Blocs has integrated support for a range of premium (paid) and open source (free) third party Content Management Systems.
- Pulse CMS
- October CMS
- Surreal CMS
- Cushy CMS
- Disqus Comments
I think Wordpress is comming as well.
Also has a built in Google font manager, and a very nice built in media manager.
I assume the external eCommerce systems will work as well. Shame Rapidcart isn’t as active as I think that was a real plus for Rapidweaver.
I wrote quite a long piece somewhere on the web about the preview performance between Blocs and RapidWeaver. I was not able to locate it though…
Basically, when you compare Blocs to RapidWeaver+Stacks, Blocs has vastly less flexibility in terms of layouts and options. When you have less options, things can be made faster. You can get the same preview performance in RapidWeaver if you use simpler layouts and add-ons with less options. But we all love having all of the power and options…
With that said RapidWeaver 8 is the bee’s knees and will a lot of the points made here mute… We should have it soon. 
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There are a number of Bloc’s user using online eCommerce services like Ecwid or FastSpring. There is nothing like RapidCart (self-contained), but RapidCart isn’t supported anymore in RapidWeaver.
Not wanting to turn this into a one is better than the other, but you must have based your ideas on very early versions of Blocs App and does not reflect where Blocs is today. Also, I would not agree that Blocs has vastly less flexibility and the 3 links to Blocs sites I posted above, illustrate this with real examples of design layout flexibility.
Blocs actually has vastly more settings than Foundation with stacks for example, but Blocs processes those settings in a much more efficient way. E.g. every Blocs Bric and Block has a common interface with typically 20 settings and a deeper 40 settings when using the powerful Class Manager. This gives an instant WYSIWYG edit view update without any need to Publish because you see the changes to the edit page instantly when each page change is made. It isn’t the number of settings, but the process that Blocs uses that makes the difference. Blocs does not have to go through an Add-on such as Stacks which then has to read every stack setting, flush caches, etc and then preview the whole page. In addition, the Blocs common interface can add very powerful features such as adding animation or parallax or video backgrounds to any element. A similar RW solution would need stacks inside stacks inside stacks which further compounds the amount of settings that RW has to perform and adds to Preview and Publish delay.
“RapidWeaver 8 is the bee’s knees and will a lot of the points made here mute…” Now that’s what we all want to hear. RW speed up was I seem to recall, the most requested new feature for RW8.
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Hey all,
RapidWeaver 8 is just around the corner, along with TotalCMS 2, and Stacks 4 due later this year. With all this going on and more, this is probably one of the most exciting times ever to be an RW user.
Also, RapidWeaver 8 contains many great enhancements, one of them being that you won’t need to buy a separate app (like Solis) to be able to view multiple responsive previews at the same time 
We’re also developing an entirely new page type, and while this won’t make it into the initial launch of RW8 it will be one of the next big things we ship after that.
There’s some exciting developments ahead, and if you’re already invested in the RapidWeaver community and workflow I wouldn’t bother looking elsewhere, the future is looking really, really bright.
Next week we’re going to start posting more information about the new features in RapidWeaver 8 on our blog, so look out for that!
Happy Weaving
Dan
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