A Look Back At Wappler on 2021 Eve + Wishlist

Wappler General Praise
#1

Hi All.
I have been a developer since school, playing around with various technologies and platforms - nothing fancy though, just the regular ones - PHP, ASP, C#, Java, MSSQL, MySQL and otheres. Before Wappler, I was either using Visual Studio IDE for .NET stuff or Notepad etc for PHP.
@nshkrsh and I started our company in 2015 and had been using VS or PHP for everything in the beginning. We also divulged into Webflow for the UI end of things for a couple years, before we found Wappler in December 2018.

I had never used Bootstrap before. Had never used Dreamweaver. Never ever heard of DMXZone.
Getting on board with Wappler with the limited docs was a challenge. I took on a small project with a single pager front-end and a back-end admin panel with a few pages and not too complex functionality.

In initial days, I was not doing very well with Wappler and was expecting it to take ~50% more time than if I would have used my previous tools. But, when I started on the back end, I pretty much saved 70% of my time there!! :exploding_head:
So, overall I ended up putting in about 10-15% extra time with Wappler, because I was learning and building. The time saved in back-end was enough for us to ditch Webflow and to struggle and learn Bootstrap a bit more and use only Wappler for our projects going forward.

Over the course of few more months, we worked on few more projects, learned a lot more and started to feel a bit more comfortable. Later we got a project (which is still on-going :crossed_fingers:) via community here. That helped us make use of many more components of Wappler (we still haven’t used all in the past two years) and understand a few inner workings too. This project has evolved into a huge complex application which someone might not even believe is built on Wappler if shown to them now (although we can’t :shushing_face: ). Same can be said for some of our other Wappler projects too.

The past two years with Wappler have been great :star_struck: and we are still learning things (still docs are lacking) about Wappler and making our projects better.
I would like to thank the Wappler team for their support here in community, and for implementing great ideas in Wappler and making it feel like a much more mature product in the past two years.
Many other community members have been really helpful too - weather it is providing help and solutions on our posts, or posting bugs and how-to-s from their experiences which have been helpful to us.

We as a team have tried to help a few of the members too and have also shared our experience as a paid service with one-on-one sessions (DM @nshkrsh for details. #shameless-plug :grin:).
We have added a few more clients and grown our team a little in the past two years too. And are happy to say that our focus is completely on delivering secure, easy and good web apps via Wappler :pray: .

A wishlist for Wappler team in 2021:

  1. Add more people to the team. Mainly for support and docs.
  2. Take a backseat on weekly feature updates and shift resources towards support and cleaning up the community’s stale posts and pending bug fixes. (I assume the team has a road map on features they wish to add, but if it can be adjusted…)
  3. Setup weekly updates to be something like-
    1st Week: Release Feature updates.
    2nd & 3rd Week: Focus on Bug fixes, community clean up, work on other feature updates in beta channel (ref. point 5).
    4th Week: Focus on creating missing docs and new docs for next week’s feature update. (New docs have been usually on-point with new features since past few months :+1: ).
  4. Deliver on the feature requests as per votes.
  5. Create a separate beta channel - similar to Windows Insider program kind of thing. The experimental toggle is cool too, but that usually ends up breaking things if switched on accidentally.
  6. A better feature tracking and bug tracking tool other than community. (Sadly, don’t have any suggestions for this.)
  7. A voting mechanism on features you guys plan to add so it can be prioritized better based on what devs might actually need.

DISCLAIMER: The above list is based on my limited knowledge of software development and experience with Wappler.

Lastly, a big THANK YOU to team Wappler for thinking, building and maintaining this amazing idea of an open, visual and low-code platform for web development :tada:. Hope this keeps improving and continues to build towards a more capable IDE for web & mobile app development.

Looking at George’s Medium post about Wappler’s year in review, I realised how much was added to Wappler in just a year and how quickly we get accustomed to it and start taking it for granted. Hence decided to write this post.

Happy New Year 2021 Everyone. :partying_face: :slightly_smiling_face:

P.S. It would take about 10 days to re-do the first project that I built on Wappler which 2 years ago took about 2 months to complete. From scratch. And I can deliver a better UX too.

10 Likes
#2

Thank you Siddhant (@sid) for the post and a Happy 2021 from me to all as well. In general, I agree with the comments made about Wappler, though the following statement is a bit of a mystery, at least for me.

Ken Truesdale (@mebeingken) has started with a great series to get started with Wappler.

Then there is the documentation that is created in the main by @Teodor:

And I have made attempts to create videos. This is Wappler for new users:

This is Bootstrap for Wappler:

What I would love to know is: What documentation you would like to see?

Please keep in mind that Wappler is merely a tool that assists in developing an application. There are many different types of applications that can be built, each requiring a different technology. It would be impossible to document each of these technologies separately unless specifically asked for. Hence my question.

1 Like
#3

Hi @ben.
As great as all the videos that you and Ken have delivered are, they are not docs. (I can’t emphasise enough how helpful your videos have been to me and now Ken’s for those starting today :pray:)
The videos are more of a tutorial or example kind of material. They are important too, but only after documentation.
Same goes for many of the items in Wappler docs - they are mostly examples. And those which are written as a documentation are incomplete in the sense they don’t always cover everything.

When I say documentation, I mean a place where every single option/feature/menu/icon/others Wappler has, no matter how obvious, is defined in text. Even the save button should have a place in documentation.
The simplest example of lacking docs I can think of is Flows. Its extremely powerful and a great addition to the client side logic building. But there are virtually no docs explaining every function it has and all the properties etc there are.

As an example on the server end, there are many formatters that don’t support all server models, but still appear in the UI and there is no way for the user to know it does not work.

I understand that Wappler is a rapidly updating application which does not give enough resources for the small team to work on all aspects of it.
Also, I think because Wappler has its roots in DMXZone, the team did not explain many options and features that were directly ported in the beginning.
For a guy like me who has no idea about DMXZone and many others starting today who have no knowledge of it, its a steep learning curve.

Another point I think that has led to lack of detailed docs is Wappler was initially targeted at DMXZone devs and web devs. I think. But being such a powerful tool, visual building capabilities and more flexibility than Bubble and other counter-parts, every layman wants to get on board - Wappler is no longer a tool just for developers.
I agree that Wappler docs cannot and SHOULD NOT cover various kinds of apps than can be built. Its not practical. But there should be docs for everything Wappler offers in their UI and how they are intended to be used under every server model it supports.
What to build or how to build your idea using Wappler is not part of documentation - for all other tools too, not just Wappler - but what everything you see in Wappler and what it means is.

So in conclusion, with great power should come great documentation. :sweat_smile:

5 Likes
#4

:+1: I cannot agree more! In fact, this is a great discussion to have. On a number of occasions I have suggested being able to click on an item in Installed Extensions to see the documentation connected to that item.

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This may not cover all of the issues that you have mentioned, but it would be a great start. With you all the way.

5 Likes
#5

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To be honest, I don’t remember opening the extensions in forever.
This is actually a great place to give a link to associated help doc. It covers both client & server side components too. :clap:
And I guess people will start using this section then. :sweat_smile:

3 Likes
#6

fantastic idea! second it.

1 Like
#7

Hi, found Wappler some time back. I’ve really enjoyed using it. I’ve followed @mebeingken’s video course, and also watched a few of @ben’s videos. I come primarily from a .NET development background. But I really like what is possible with Wappler using nodejs and App Connect.

One feature I’d love to see, is an integration within the asset manager to support Creative Commons libraries for images, audio, and video. This would save a lot of time by not having to ever leave Wappler. Also maybe a community-driven repository of some pre-built front-end templates?

Cheers.

2 Likes
#8

That’s a great suggestion. If you could create a new post under feature request for this, and share the link here, I would definitely vote for it.

Bootstrap theme manager was added to Wappler this year. I got around to using it just last month. I am not sure if anyone is working in this direction of templates, but if the users share their creations, the team can always create a new category here in community itself for pre-built themes similar to new categories that were added for custom modules.
Maybe you can be the one to start it as I don’t see myself to be capable enough right now.

1 Like
#9

Done. Creative Commons Asset Manager Integration

Possibly. I have to consider my availability plus I need to learn Wappler more. There’s still a large disconnect for me with how certain things are done with Wappler and I’d like to focus on learning them for now.

Once I’ve had some time to bring a couple of projects to full production, I’d definitely be interested in helping out however I can.

1 Like