Thanks for V4 and the hard work but ... some wishes

Wappler General
#21

After reading this the impression I get Is you’re wanting some documentation where you can see what you are building for example instagram, Facebook, Twitter clones but you’d never actually use this on sites it’s more the learning process which is completely understandable. However would it not be more effective if there was for example an ‘advanced blog’ tutorial as essentially Facebook. Instagram, Twitter all work that area in somewhat the same way I believe (obviously they all have different features but the basics of them).

So if there was an advanced blog tutorial for example you could break it into sections of just building a basic blog all the way to a blog that has filters for categories etc searching blog titles stuff like that

If possible showing everything from a certain point e.g you have a database connection setup already and the tutorial just shows you how to add the new tables etc

This way as long as Wappler let you use the design etc technically you could just use this straight off the bat and customise to your liking with a fully functioning blog area.

Maybe a online show case or demo project so you can play around with it before you even build it could be useful too

Not to mention the time it saves the team from making clones that essentially use the same principles

Just my opinion if the desire here is the idea of been able to see what you’re creating.

3 Likes
#22

you are right, this could be :

  • an advanced marketplace (with payments, recurring payment, escrow and booking).
  • an advanced blog (with some advanced filtering and editing, images manipulation and forms).
  • an advanced online consultation app (with agora integration, calendar and high security set up).
  • an advanced app using maps and live reload with sockets and geoloc.
  • and advanced inventory app (with big amount of data manipulation, filtering, sorting, cross db manipulation etc).
    They are just exemples but with those 5 apps you cover 90% of what even an advanced user needs to know to build almost anything.
    Video + code to play with is the way to go imho (more than screenshot step by step - wich is more ok for some isolated features, or short how to).

PS : if needed I’m ok to do French translations ))

1 Like
#23

that’s missing the point - nobody (I hope) is using a walkthrough like these in hopes of cloning a pre-existing platform and becoming famous and rich like Zuckerberg.

Just like if an HTML course on Codecademy uses an Airbnb lookalike as a walkthrough for learning how HTML/CSS works using a familiar site as a starting point, a walkthrough like the ones I shared above show how the UI/workflows/features/tools all work together on the bubble platform. Just giving the early user a starting point of familiarity and then allowing the user to work through the various tools and workflows required to build something like the original example. Then, you use that knowledge of the platform to build your own stuff- sometimes using similar elements or approaches you’ve learned in the process of building an example clone.

A clone is a cool way to do it because you know how the original looks and feels- does your version do the same stuff and look the same? If not, why? Go back through and see what you’re missing and master the tools at your disposal - it’s effective and other learning platforms use this very approach.

3 Likes
#24

I have a good idea for your next guide Teodor: “how to build a Wappler clone” and of course “how to get free beer with my Wappler clone”.

Captura de Pantalla 2021-07-24 a la(s) 18.09.24
Captura de Pantalla 2021-07-24 a la(s) 18.09.241160×1064 188 KB

#25

I get your point but it’s still marketing. You won’t learn more or quicker by creating a clone. You might have more fun(I can give you that).

You would learn the same from cloning one of my apps for instance. They are more boring but I can assure you they are quite more complex and better built than bubble popular website clones.

Those clones are just marketing. The value is to showcase the tool to possible clients, not to teach them.

2 Likes
#26

I agree with you to a point… However, I think that a benefit of “cloning” an “airbnb” is because it’s an industry-leading website that we can find best practices utilized in terms of UI/UX, data management, security, etc. (not that your example website wouldn’t be those things, no insult intended)

There’s also the familiarity of the original article - if your “cloned” Facebook app is using a hideous scroll bar instead of an infinite scroll you’ll immediately see that and realize that your scrolling sucks and you’ll go figure that out. It helps you break through to some cool UI/UX tricks that the great sites use… instead of stock/boring/out-of-the-box elements.

If Wappler had walkthroughs for different app types or clones, it’d be amazing for new users- especially users who have already gotten this far by learning via online courses that already use this approach (users like me lol).

Those walkthroughs can be in the form of “an advanced xyz” or a “build a facebook clone in 15 minutes” kind of thing… either will be a major win for Wappler’s new users in my opinion.

I’m learning Wappler now and if I get this thing fully figured out I can be first to market with a whole series of these things and get rich teaching people how to make clones with Wappler- lol - it’s an opportunity for somebody for sure!

I sincerely want Wappler to win the new users- I’m one right now and I struggle to learn it after watching videos, reading the docs, and posting dumb questions on your forum. I accept that there is a learning curve. I can relate to past experiences where I breezed through learning curves without even knowing that I was simply because I was focusing on the guided task of cloning something I was familiar with instead of building something abstract out of the gate.

Please provide some walkthroughs and call them whatever you want. It’ll help new users master this amazing platform you’re building and will certainly grow your new user adoption because there are tons of guys like me out there that would benefit from them… I’m a generic new user- bubble guy- have patience with dudes like me and help us with some guided end-to-end walkthroughs to build some standard web apps and we’ll use Wappler till the cows come home.

2 Likes
#27

Same profile here and 100% same issues and frustration. Learning curve is known but I got the feeling that it could be 3 times shorter with the right documentation / ecosystem of courses & videos. It’s frustrating.

I agree on your points about new users. I have talked about and Brought people to Wappler. 100% stopped after playing few hours with the tool and not being able to do even simple things or find the right information at the right place to do so. All of them back to bubble and frustrated.

3 Likes
#28

I can assure you my webapps are far worse than Netflix in all those aspects. I don’t have the budget and resources they manage :joy: I wish I did! But they are good enough to serve as examples of well made apps.

The problem is you won’t learn all those topics from Bubble’s clones because they are not meant to teach any of that. And if that’s the purpose of them they are doing a horrible job because those clones are not even 0.01% of what Netflix is. It is just a half-baked frontend that mimics Netflix design and a simple backend that might do one or two things like login a user and showing a catalogue of posters of movies.

Just recently Bubble changed a thingy regarding their login/register workflow because it was considered a bad practice. So whatever clone you could build it was already flawed in security terms.

https://forum.bubble.io/t/breaking-change-login-failure-messages/151087

That is very true. If you think there is a market there exploit it. Unlike Bubble, Wappler has a smaller ecosystem of 3rd parties so there is close to zero competition.

I also come from Bubble(you can find me in the forums with the same name) so I can understand your pain when migrating and finding less resources and no 3rd parties. Fortunately for me I have a coding background so I was able to adapt pretty quick.

All in all, I hope you finally break the learning curve and take advantage of the zero competition in the clones in Wappler. There is no zeroqode here yet :slight_smile:

Good luck! And if not clear, we are here to help whenever you feel stuck.

#29

Hey @jasond and @GlobaticoLabs , how exactly u can clone something when you don’t know how it’s done?? or u mean just clone the front-end? because behind the frontend you could have 200 micro services or more each with hundreds of server actions.

Sure there are things that one can guess how they work, but I doubt that Airbnb is going to open the doors to show you how they did all their backend and even if they did I think it would be a tutorial of more than 100 videos, it does not make sense.

The same with Facebook or Instagram, they are huge software designed, programmed and maintained by many developers, how are they supposed to explain how to do that in a tutorial?

Anyone who says “how to make a copy of instagram, facebook, etc in 15 min, in a week or in a month” is lying, because it only shows you how to do something similar visually but not how it is actually done behind the curtains.

So the question is: Would you like Wappler to lie to you and tell you that you can make an intagram clone with a simple tutorial?
Every time you find a tutorial like this on YouTube, don’t you think they only show you the simplest of the project?

Take Visual Studio Code, for example, you go to Microsoft and say “can you build me a store like Amazon so I can clone it and maybe change some things and that way your tool would interest me more?”

The thing is that Wappler is just a tool, like a hammer for a carpenter, you don’t go to the store and tell the seller to show you how to build a house with the hammer to convince you to buy it, right? Well Wappler is an advanced tool with which to build applications through a visual interface and code in a faster way.

On the other hand, Wappler only gives you basic examples of how to use the tools that they provide, you are the one who then has to modify it to your own requirements or those of your clients in a more or less advanced way, because nobody does things in the same way.

Do not forget that Wappler is a low code programming tool and not a no code tool, that is why it is not for everyone, they do not have “out of the box” solutions that create an advanced application like Airbnb simply with the visual interface, I always say that to use Wappler it is good to know certain fundamentals of how MVC works for example or what a database is and you have that for free on YouTube and many other places.

Having said all this, Wappler has a community that answers specific questions, so if you don’t know how to do an infinity scroll or how to incorporate emojis in a chat by saying some examples, you can create a topic about it and ask your question that can result in that little by little you can acquire more knowledge and build your own app without having to try to clone others.
And who says, in the future maybe other people will ask how to make your app in a 15 min tutorial :wink:.

4 Likes
#30

I agree with everything you stated here- but I don’t think I did a good job explaining what I find valuable in the “make an xyz clone in 15 minutes” walkthroughs.

While I understand that I’m not building a true fully-cloned version of Facebook in 15 minutes, I do think that I will get a great feel for the Wappler UI- understand which buttons do what things; knowing the best order of creating actions, setting up pages, how the various frameworks interact.

A walkthrough gives you a quick and dirty overview of the Wappler editor’s features, functionalities, tips/tricks, best practices for general-use setups.

I know I’m not building an end-to-end Facebook in 15 minutes but I can learn a whole lot about the Wappler interface by building a crappy version of it as a crash course.

2 Likes
#31

Here comes the positioning of the product. Either Wappler is low code tool for VSC users that are tired to dev or it’s a low code / no code tool that is targeting also non dev and in this case your comparaison with Visual Studio is not adequate.

The main question here is what Wappler want to a achieve and who are the users they want to target. My opinion : there is 10000000 more opportunities in the no code / low code space for a tool like Wappler.

#32

Yes and no. I think this statement was true 2 years ago but not today anymore. Missing very little to make Wappler a solid no code tool.

#33

Main purpose is not to create Facebook in 15 minutes. Nobody believes this is even possible. Those how to are useful and used by most of the platforms… for a reason : it’s efficient for marketing and for learning. When sometimes is adopted by most it’s for a reason :wink:

#34

It’s adopted for marketing purposes, not for learning. It’s not good learning material.
I don’t remember learning to code at uni by cloning apps :wink:
They focused on basics. Get your basics right and everything will get easier from there.

2 Likes
#35

yes but this is the point : people using no code apps or Wappler don’t want to learn to code, it’s the last thing they want in life :wink:

#36

It’s not about that. In my specific case it was coding but that is just a coincidence. My post was about the learning process. It translates to any type of formal education. Focus on the basics and build from there.

If the small team starts focusing on building tutorials for cloning apps this is what is going to happen:

  1. New features and bug squashing will suffer.
  2. They will get an influx of shiny object chasers without the resources to give proper support -> Uncontrolled growth.
  3. Those users will end up having the same repeated problems as any user has but now the team doesn’t have time to reply to them.
  4. Those shiny object chasers will eventually leave when they find out they actually need to put some work into things.
  5. Established users will be pissed off.
  6. You guys will have not learnt anything productive from those tutorials.
  7. A few vultures will notice that the team is lagging with actual value(product and real learning materials) and will establish a 3rd party empire surrounding Wappler to fill the gaps.
  8. Now we have Bubble 2.
  9. Users will migrate looking for a new Wappler.

P.S. I had a marathon of Michael Bay’s movies last night. It might have inspired this catastrophic scenario :joy:

4 Likes
#37

The problem with all the no code tools out there targeting designers with no idea how a web site/app works and don’t have any basic knowledge of the technical part (bubble, webflow, wix etc.) is: you are limited in what you can achieve.

If you are comfortable with the basic results of the tutorials there - fine. But the moment you want to add more advanced options or change the default behavior of the components then you are screwed. You are either limited to the platform hosting owning your code and locking you there, or the code is proprietary.
You will have to pay for third party plugins which may cause even more troubles, missing support, bugs and still it may not be the result you need.

With Wappler you can extend everything with the functionality you need, you own the code, you have access to code and you can build literally anything … even a Facebook clone :joy:

9 Likes
#38

I feel like what we discussed above is way better than cloning apps for multiple reasons

  1. This way allows the team to save a lot of time by only creating one advanced tutorial that fits in all apps of that kind for example the advanced blog one would cover: Facebooks feed, Instagram feed, Twitter feed, A blog site and way more compared to recreating the same concept 3 times.
  2. With Wappler creating the content by scratch you could even go one step further and maybe if possible have some way of adding a blog template instantly then just setting up your actions and customising the blog template to your liking (not sure about this one)
  3. Continuing from point 2 if they allow you to use the designs used even a no code person would find this easy as a lot of css would already be in place.
  4. It showcases the features of Wappler in the optimal way not how we think or expect the big apps create their backends.

This is just some reasons in my opinion as really the only difference with some parts of the big apps is the styles and a few features, but if the ‘advanced blog tutorial’ covers features on them all again this would be no issue and avoid repeating tutorials saving time.

2 Likes
#39

Webflow and Wix are not in the same bucket as bubble and they don’t target the same users and needs. Wix and Weblow are not in the same league neither.

Regarding bubble, i think the main issues with bubble are :

  • you don’t own / can’t decide where to host your app.
  • performances are bad (to very bad) and complicated (to impossible) to run for production (even when you spend $1000s with them).
  • responsive engine is a nightmare and even when you know “how to” it takes a lot of time to get things responsive.
  • plugins has to be seen as something not mandatory but a time saver for those who want to. Minus : they don’t check the quality of plugin so the marketplace is full of garbage and crappy ones.

Wappler brings a solution to all those key points. Don’t take my point as an offence but for no code users, wappler has a steep learning curve and it’s ok with that. BUT my point was that the current documentation / courses / tutorials are helping but improvements on this side would really be a game changer.

But again i don’t know wappler strategy and positionning, so maybe your target users are dev and i guess in this case it’s ok to get support from the forum for specific points.

4 Likes
#40

That maybe the case, but still the limitations are the same :slight_smile: