Material, Basic pages, other Frameworks

Please please please can we have support for other Frameworks outside of Bootstrap! Even support for adding components to straight forward HTML pages would be great! Have just commented on a thread:

Which highlights issues stopping us from dropping our Dreamweaver subscription…

The ability to work with straight forward HTML pages would be a begining, and maybe add some other Frameworks like Material for example…? We want to drop Dreamweaver all together but we are forced to use it as Wappler simply doesn’t want to work with anything other than Bootstrap. Appreciate a lot of effort has gone in to this, and it would take quite some work to introduce other Frameworks, but as it is a good fifty percent of our Projects are still maintained and designed within Dreamweaver as I’m writing this. Would be fantastic to be 100% Wappler developed but its just not possible right now.

Please consider this request and please vote if you agree and suggest other Frameworks that you encounter while designing applications.

Thank you kindly @George, @Teodor, @patrick

You can work with any HTML page in Wappler directly - no matter if the framework is recognized or not.

You have design view, code view and css and dom panels. Even more than in DW.

So I don’t really get what you are missing in comparison with DW…

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We get many clients that have used templates from market places like Envato. We import these in to Wappler and they just don’t work. Go try this yourself and see what happens. Most of the time Wappler fails to recognise custom implementations of Bootstrap and wants you to replace it. I’m not making this up. I’m not attacking Wappler. Why is it when these suggestions are made by a User we are made to feel like we are attacking the product itself, we are not. Its merely a suggestion and observation. And it’s not a comparison at all! It is what we have had to do to continue working on such Projects! For instance go get yourself a copy of the very popular Metronic admin theme and open it in Wappler. We don’t persuade clients to use this, but some do, like many other ‘themes’. Open it up and see what you get…

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So actually your question is not about supporting other frameworks but just better recognition of the bootstrap 4 include paths?

We will be improving the recognition and allow even some custom paths for BS4 soon.

Also other CSS frameworks are being evaluated to be added. We just want to choose the best ones and not end up in the paradox of choice :slight_smile:

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That would be a start George. We have been asking for a long time to be able to specify the path to Bootstrap ourselves. For instance we inherit a design from a Client. We open it in Wappler. It has been built upon Bootstrap but Wappler does not like it because the paths to Bootstrap maybe different and Wappler will not work these bespoke or alternative arrangements. Yes you can use the DOM but then Wappler soon drifts away from a no-code/low-code solution, it then becomes simply an editor. I’m all for things like Node and Docker but they don’t aid in designing an application from an aesthetic stand-point. It seems that this aspect of Wappler is somewhat neglected, that is just how it feels George. It’s not a dig at Wappler, I’m not having a go, I’m not saying this or that is better… It would be really nice to have some focus on Wapplers design capabilities, some enhancements, some attention (yes we now have a theme editor but for Mobile and Desktop the implementation of this is not yet available as far as I remember?). After all the majority of web deployments are not Docker, nor Node, they are essentially the same technologies that people have used for the last several years. Trends and the leading edge designers, working from the ground up may want Docker and Node but in the majority of circumstances and to most designers they want control over the aesthetics and layout of the applications they are working with. It is frustrating George.

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Please go and download a couple of popular Bootstrap templates and try to work with them yourself. You will soon find it is difficult. If you do change the path to Bootstrap, or overwrite the default files Wappler uses, it will overwrite those customisation and upload what Wappler wants and not what the User wants. You have to turn off FTP and set local otherwise these changes are lost repeatedly. As I said above, it is frustrating.

The problem with using ready to go templates has been discussed many times.

The main issue is not the paths and recognition of bootstrap but all the custom made or tweaked components used.

Usually it is much easier to just rebuild the template in Wappler, with Wappler’s own data drives components instead of trying to tweak third party components in code to make them dynamic.

Have you ever sat down with a Client and suggested you charge them for several days work in some circumstances to ‘fix’ essentially what is not broken? Its the basics George, plain and simple. A lot of Clients use these ready to go templates. I’ve seen it on here several times people trying to work with such themes. Surely it is worth some attention?

Its a big problem George. One last time please try it for yourself.

So maybe instead of asking Wappler to support any possible template, it might be better idea to go and ask the template builders to make a Wappler version of their templates!

This way it will be useful to much more people and also working straight from Wappler with Wappler’s own heavy duty proven components.

The more people ask the template builders to support Wappler - the sooner it will become a really and a standard.

For the template builders it is just a small effort. As long as there is a marked demand.

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The old DMX extensions for Bootstrap allowed us to specify a path. So sad this feature was lost. That in itself would make working on these templates so much easier! So we won’t be expecting this ability any time soon then, if at all? Something so simple and logical. A real shame. Sorry I wasted so many keystrokes George.

Will see what we can do about the custom BS4 path, but as I said above that is the least of your problems.

Thanks appreciated. Not the least of my problems. Its a big problem (for anything designed with Bootstrap outside of Wapplers chosen path) with a simple solution in theory. Allow for the path adjustment by the user. So will beg to differ there I’m afraid, but appreciated none the less George so thanks again.

Normally a third party bootstrap theme consists in a bunch of sass files that will be compiled into the final minified bootstrap file.

If you could figure a way so we could add our sass files to the theme manager so they were compiled into the local bootstrap file that would be a start.

This together with setting local route for bootstrap files as some designers do not provide sass files and just the final css.

Html layouts that come with these bootstrap themes are part of a completely different and problematic topic.

All in all I look forward for BS5 and dropping jquery. I like where Tailwind CSS is going though.

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for what’s it worth: we’ve used themes from getbootstrap.com and creative-tim.com with good success with Wappler. minor customisations were made - but that’s ok. JS stuff messes up a bit between wappler and theme - so needs some workarounds.

This. +1

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+1 for Material design template support. Bootstrap looks so 2010.

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For anyone who finds this thread later, I found that the GetBootstrap, Creative-Tim themes (I was looking at admin themes specifically) weren’t very Wappler-friendly.

I did find this company’s themes on Themeforest were so I thought I’d share the info and hopefully save someone some time: https://themeforest.net/user/Laborator/portfolio