Possible to buy components individually?

Sure, and we’ve already seen Brian’s video showing a SCRUD application made in about 15 mins :slight_smile:

Make this 5 or 10 hours for any new user, then still you can do pretty much everything in 1 whole month.

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Hi Paul. I think I’ve done a good 100 sites too in my 25 years and you were coming from the same angle as me, so it’s interesting to hear your views. Thanks.

Customers have a habit of asking to make their site do something that an out-of-the-box solution can’t do, be it a widget, plugin or complete WYSIWYG tool. That’s why I hand code pretty much everything because I can make it do anything the customer wants. Surely Wappler doesn’t provide that flexibility just from a GUI?

Presumably I can edit the html and php files in a text editor to modify code. If I later load those files back into Wappler would it lose the ability to visually manage what I changed? Just wondering.

@Teodor, are you saying that I can “activate” Wappler for just one month without any recurring charges? Would I have to manually cancel before it renews next month? And then maybe 3 months later when I have another project I can activate it again for that month?

While Wappler is deactivated would I be able to make changes to the html and php files in a text editor for minor things without breaking Wappler’s ability to visually edit those files next time I activate it? (Assuming my code is clean.)

Thanks.

After your 1 month subscription, if you did not set auto payment, you simply could not use Wappler, which is very good. It is very economical compared to many. But verily, verily, this is one of the greatest and most improved applications in the WORLD.

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Of course :slight_smile: that’s why we have monthly plans - you can subscribe for one month and then cancel the auto renewal.

Yes, of course. Unlike other site building tools we don’t lock the code - you can edit it in any code editor, as it’s normal HTML/CSS/JS code.

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@Teodor @Bankym - thank you for confirming that. There’s no excuse for me now, is there? :laughing:

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Hi @garyf, here is my full synopsis on this, seeing as i am coming from the same sort of background as you. This will be a fairly long story, but I feel important to some.

I started off as a php developer, who was forced to also learn supporting languages like sql and javascript and later jquery to get my customers visions on the web, if it were up to me, I would have just used php, and thats all, but all the others kind of needed to be there to complete the puzzle.

The great thing about this, was the freedom to do whatever i wanted, exactly how i wanted, the disadvantage, was the rapid development and speed factor of hand coding. This made it that my quotes were often way higher than my competitors, and telling your client that your competitor is probably using WordPress, and spending 30 minutes telling how terrible WordPress is, or can be in the wrong hands, unfortunately only goes so far.
I found myself having to reduce my pricing structure to compete, and still hand code, which meant I was loosing money, spending far more hours than my counterparts.

I went in the search of something better, with the view in mind, there has to be a better way. I can not tell you exactly what order I tried what, but here they are.

I Tried:
WordPress - This certainly gave me rapid development, and i hated every second of it, being a control freak, and clicking activate to a plugin, not knowing what that thing is doing in the background, is like pushing the big red button, that says, do not push, it almost drove me crazy. Secondly the excess code and clumsy code in there was something i just could not live with. Some people do not care how it works, as long as it works, I am not that guy.

iWeb - Great, drag stuff around, create about a million inline styles automatically with cryptic classes, umm, no. Also no way i could ever see to create applications and complex backends, just for pretty websites that do almost nothing.

RapidWeaver, CoffeeCup Software, Google site builders, etc. The list goes on, Adobe Muse, Bootstrap online builders - All the same as iWeb, some a little better, some a little worse, but all similar. None of them could do everything.

DreamWeaver, stand alone, i used like a more complex texteditor only, to be honest, but it was about the best solution at the time, and to make things more rapid, I used plugins from PV7, etc. This allowed me to do all my front end development better than before, but I was missing all the stuff to do the backend properly, so I was hand coding all that still. Eventually a wonderful day arrived and ADDT came to my attention, Adobe Dreamweaver Developer Toolkit, was like my first love, it offered me everything i wanted, support was pretty decent, but its development was a little stagnant, and was not really being added to as regularly as I would have liked. As versions of PHP and SQL changed it became more challenging for it to support the newer features.
Then it was announced that Dreamweaver would take over Interakt who were the developers of ADDT, and I was very excited to see Dreamweaver fix all the little issues I was having, offer support for it etc. Instead they bought it, so they could throw it in the bin. And suddenly my utter hatred of Dreamweaver began.

I moved onto my old faithful text editors, like Sublime and Espresso, and said I would never go back, this is how i will do this forever more. Then I started doing some Adobe Flash stuff for clients in ActionScript 3 and found a company called DmxZone that had some nifty plugins for it, mainly for uploading files using swf format that i really needed. They offered each plugin as a standalone purchase, as you enjoy, so I got it and was blown away by its usage. I continued using their stuff all through the Flash Websites craze, until that became the big baddie in the WebDevelopment world.

I now had to go back the HTML from Flash, so I looked at DmxZone and they offered everything ADDT offered and even more, BUT, all from within DreamWeaver, so I had to go back to DreamWeaver to use DmxZone plugins.
Advantages were they had a plugin for everything, but everything was a standalone pack i had to purchase, I must have purchased a couple thousand dollars worth of single extensions, it became quite expensive, I will admit. But it was worth it.
Sadly at some point DmxZone started automating certain things, like jQuery updates, so you would open an index.php file into DreamWeaver and your code would just start hopping around for a second while it did its own thing, which i did not like, and secondly, it broke some things, because I was a version behind on one plugin and purchased a new plugin that needed a higher version of jQuery that the old plugin did not like.

To get around this issue, what i did was firstly as soon as I could afford it, i purchased a subscription to DmxZone, so I could have all the plugins, and all the latest ones. This worked out far cheeper for me. Secondly the updates were no longer an issue, and that is how i did things for many years. Starting off with a 960gs grid, later Bootstrap, using PV7 and DmxZone together I got the best of front end and backend that i needed.

Wappler was announced, it is made by DmxZone, it is subscription, it has all the plugins, no compatibility issues with Dreamweaver, it hopefully kills Dreamweaver which is the ultimate payback for them killing Interakt, so for me it is the ultimate tool.

Wappler does not give you a plugin that works in one way, they give you a set of tools that make up a larger tool, that allow you to make anything you can imagine.
In other words, it would sometimes be nice, like in WordPress to just install the latest Wappler plugin, and like magic you can do something new.
Lets say a File Upload plugin, you hit install and now you can upload files, easy as that, but for people like me and you by the sounds of things, your needs may extend that plugins presets.

What Wappler does is give you 100 tools that all work together, and any tool can work seamlessly with the other tool, and all can be arranged in any order you want, and each is a smaller part of a whole.

So now i want to create a website.
I need Bootstrap, ok then Wappler just add Bootstrap please, nothing more, nothing less.

I need to make this an App to make server side calls and client side modification, add App Connect

I need to make a file upload, ok
add a form first,
make a file upload field,
do i want to offer multi upload or single, choose that,
do i want to restrict file type, choose that,
do i want to restrict file size, set that
I want to save the file to the server, open server connect and make an action
I want a database connected, add a database connection step, dont add it if you dont want it
I want the name stored in a particular table, add the database insert step.
I want the file resized, add a resize step
I want the file saved to a different directory, add a file management step
I want the image rotated, add that step

You get the point, it is exactly like manually coding, you want something you choose it, you dont want something, then leave it out and the entire end result works with or without almost any step you want.
The only difference is that instead of going to php.net and finding what command does that, and what parameters you can control of the command.
You choose the command in a GUI and set the parameters of the command visually.

If there is something you can not do, ask Wappler to add it, wait a week or 2 and its generally added.

Cant wait that long, manually edit the code yourself in Wappler or any TextEditor, it is fully transparent, and ALL the supporting files are included for your project, so you have as much freedom as you like.

I hope this super long explanation helps.

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Hi Paul. I was awarded a badge for reading your super long reply! No, just kidding. Thanks for taking the time to go over your tool history. I can relate to some of your experiences, especially with Dreamweaver because Adobe trashed its connectivity support for ColdFusion - which ironically is also an Adobe product (which they’re still developing it to this day). I might understand dropping support for a 3rd party product, but not a product made by the same company. I felt DW was getting too clunky and it often froze.

File upload is an interesting example because you need to carefully control what type of files can be uploaded and you can’t trust filename extensions, you need to look at the metadata within the file. Also what about anti-virus scanning? Using hand written code I use the command line to scan the file and if it’s dodgy I’ll delete the file and warn the user.

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There is no “antivirus scanner” included in the validation tools.
Not sure what do you call antivirus scan thought, can you clarify please?

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Haha, glad you enjoyed the read, and I think the main point is really that with Wappler you can pretty much do anything.
File Upload, anti virus scanning, I suppose would be possible, i have never tried it, and there is certainly no built in server action for “scan for virus”, but i suppose if your server had a watch folder, and a cron job, or something like that you could make it work. If not you could use your own hand coding to control just that part.
I have always worked on Apple Macs so never really spent much time too concerned with scanning anything for viruses, lol.

EDIT: before i start an entire debate, yes a Mac can get a virus, you are correct, I have never run any anti virus on any of my Macs, and I did get one virus, once, back in 2001, so yes they do get viruses too.

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@Teodor, suppose AVG is installed on the server I’d execute a command:
“avgscan d:\web\somefolder\uploads\newupload.docx”
My code would capture the output to determine if the file is clean or not and report back to the user who just uploaded the file.

That’s like walking through a city centre totally naked while wearing your best bling and holding your wallet and mobile in your hands. Sooner or later the inevitable will happen! There’s free AV software for Macs. Someone can write a new virus tomorrow knowing that most Mac users are unprotected and you’d be vulnerable. It’s not worth the risk. I’ve run AV software on every machine I’ve had since around 1990 (Amiga 500).

Haha, I have to admit, i take a look at this from a very different standpoint, and i suppose it is partly due to the way i work I suppose.

Be it Mac or PC, the way an AntiVirus package generally works, or works best is by protecting you from every single angle it can. Therefore I open my browser and it starts scanning everything I do, it checks domains against known databases etc. I open my email and it starts checking every new email that arrives and scanning all the attachments, I plug in a USB drive and it starts scanning the entire thing, in some cases even inside archives, and no matter what I touch on my operating system it is there scanning and watching.

This type of behaviour clearly has a significant impact on processor speeds, hard drive reads and writes, RAM usage, and so forth, therefore my analogy would look more like this.

I am going to buy this McLaren F1, and I am going to drive it as hard as I can, every minute of every day, I know the car was build to handle it, I will enjoy the experience, but there is a chance i could crash it, and have to buy another one, or have it rebuilt.
Alternatively, I could buy a McLaren F1 and stick a brick under the accelerator and because I purchased such a fast car, it will still be quite fast, but there is far less chance of me crashing now, although I will never enjoy what I purchased.

Sounds crazy, but I am protected too, all my work of any importance goes into Dropbox, and Dropbox has 30 days of full retrieval of any and all altered files, so worst case scenario, I get a virus, reinstall, ask Dropbox to restore, if every file was suddenly altered 3 days ago by hijacking encryption, recover all files to before the issue, and I am back to where i was.

EDIT: I also run 2 PCs, and the first thing i install is an antivirus solution before i do anything.

Some AV software used to be dreadfully bloaty with noticeable slowdowns so I was particular about which software I installed. I play some very resource intensive games on my PC (escapism from work!) and it doesn’t slow down. With SSD drives and multicore CPUs, the AV software just runs quietly in the background without impacting anything I’m doing, including browsing and downloading emails. Half the emails I receive are spam and at least one a day contains a virus of some sort. I wouldn’t know the AV software was there if it didn’t flag up a dodgy attachment or nag me to upgrade once a month!

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This one is interesting https://support.virustotal.com/hc/en-us/signin?return_to=https%3A%2F%2Fsupport.virustotal.com%2Fhc%2Fen-us%2Fsections%2F115000721169-Documentation

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I think what you are trying to achieve is depending on specific server configuration. We cannot add such a command in the scripts as we don’t know what hosting, server and server configuration are different users using. :slight_smile:

Okay, having just read this - I may just subscribe. I got the trial but due to work commitments I unfortunately didn’t get a chance to “kick the tyres” of Wappler.
The “freelance” pricing should be made more evident on the site, as tbh, as a frontend dev by profession, who’s just looking at playing around with some web app ideas in the evenings (without having to spend even more time looking at code, thus making it feel like a job), this is a good price and had I not stumbled across this thread, I would never have known.

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Hi @niall_obrien
The pricing and subscriptions terms and conditions have changed since the release of Wappler v2.

The educational pricing is strictly for educators, students and non-profits. If you are an individual or a freelancer, you need a Personal License.

Ah damn, thanks anyway.

I’ve signed up as volunteer at my local Coder-Dojo, would this possibly qualify me for the educator discount? I’d really like to get to grips with Wappler, and see if it’s possibly something I could introduce to my kids and others at my local meetup.