Wappler Ambassadors - tell us your story!

Yes you read that good! You are our Wappler Ambassadors!

You are the Wappler power users that help us to make Wappler the great tool it is and we are very thankful for that! We listen carefully to your feedback and implement the ideas you have in Wappler.
This makes Wappler the awesome product of the future!

You are the one spreading the word of Wappler across the globe and in all social channels and other forums! More people get aware of Wappler and its great powers and our users base grows by the day! We thank you for that!

So next to improving and implementing your wishes and ideas in Wappler, we are also working on improving our main Wappler.io site.

On a special section of the new site, we would like to highlight you as our Wappler Ambassadors and power users.

To do this we need your story. Many of you already posted it to this community forum and we thank you for that, but maybe you can repost it here as a standalone story that we can use on our website,

The story should be about one page (or a maybe just a half if you prefer to keep it short).
Of course it is your store but just mention the following things in it:

  • Why do you use Wappler?
  • What do you love about Wappler?
  • Who are you and what is your background?
  • How much time and money Wappler saves you?
  • Did you use other tools before Wappler and why did you now moved to Wappler?

So @ben, @brad, @psweb, @TomD, @t11, @michele, @Hyperbytes, @pixlapps, @drymetal, @s.alpaslan, @jimatjude, @mrbdrm, @randyrie, @cavadini, @wld, @revjrblack, @paul, @terrytring, @brian, @oscreative, @turn3636 and many more - please tell us your story so we can share the Wappler experience to the world!

So share your story as a reply to this topic and let the world know how proud are you with Wappler!

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I can not honestly say when I actually began web development, or more importantly when what was considered web development sneakily diversified into application development.

I think my first web site I ever created was back in early 2005, I had an idea that was going to take the world by storm and make me an internet millionaire all at the same time. The idea was a seemingly simple one, create a website selling advertising for home renovation companies in South Africa, most of which were small one man businesses struggling to get work, and rate the companies by customer reviews, so home owners would have peace of mind when choosing their household renovations specialist.

Being in the printing industry at the time I knew I had the equipment such as Mac and PC, and I knew I had the applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Freehand, Fireworks, and Dreamweaver to make my idea a reality, all I needed was the expertise. Also because I owned the business I knew my boss would be okay with it, and being in South Africa where computer skills were difficult to come by I had also done quite a bit of IT, on Mac, PC, Unix, Linux, so I figured it would be an easy natural progression.

Me and my 56k US Robotics modem were now ready to delve into the World Wide Web. I must have created my home page 50 times in 20 different applications, reworked the idea, reworked the design, and purchased about 20 books, this for Dummies, that for Dummies etc. I purchased “learn how easy web design is in 30 minutes”, “learn web design in a day”, “make any website in a day”, courses online in downloadable pdf’s, I asked friends, etc.

Nothing worked, and it was my own fault, I needed to get out of the mindset that web design was easy, well certainly not back in 2005, there was no magic application that was going to do this for me, like there are today.

I believed so strongly in my idea that I eventually started learning PHP, HTML, xHTML, Dynamic HTML, MySQL, and JavaScript. And after a short year and another 50 late night attempts, I managed to get something that I felt was pretty decent, I had to purchase more applications like Forms2Go, and Dynamic Dependant Dropdown Menus, and many P7 elements, however I had a database and I had a website that was fully functional.

I used my print skills to create 100 free adverts for home improvement companies and awaited the traffic, which never arrived, I went out and hired myself a company rep, and after 3 months she was yet to make a sale, and my wife was getting quite upset because I had employed the dumbest, prettiest blonde woman I could find. After 3 months with no sales we parted ways and I decided, well all i need to do now is learn one more thing “SEO”, another year later, and still nothing much had changed and I eventually gave up on my dreams of becoming the next big thing.

I continued in the Print Industry until 2011 when I decided that because of the knowledge I had developed in my wasted youth, and all the websites I had created for friends, just because I knew how, that I would start trying to make some money out of my skills, besides by then I had started using Adobe Dreamweaver Developer Toolkit (ADDT) and thought I was quite the hot shot.

When I opened my doors into the Web Design world, the first thing that became quickly apparent was that although I could code, I could not design to save my life, my brain is just not wired for design, however I knew hundreds of designers from the print field so I outsourced all my design, and still do.

In the first 3 months I had loads of work I already knew was in the pipeline before I even started the company. I had now completed all those websites and was searching high and low for more work, keeping in mind I had a wife with a love for all the finer things in life, 2 kids that loved money, a mother and father that needed financial assistance wherever possible. To put it bluntly my expenses were already high before I ever began and now work was difficult to come by.

Pretty soon I found my feet though and before I knew it, I was making enough to survive, unfortunately when I say survive, I mean survive if I worked 20 hour a day 7 days a week. Every task I took on would take 5 times longer than anticipated, every website I tried a new tool, such as iWeb, RapidWeaver, CoffeeCup Software, you name it, i probably tried it. I just needed to find a way to produce a website without starting in a text editor with a blank page.

Dreamweaver still does not make me feel as though I am in control of what is going on, even with all the DMX | Zone tools installed, and often I would find issues with the updates of extensions, not knowing what extension went with what other extension, and lastly each time i opened an old project that I had created with older extensions installed it would update elements and I would be scared.

Up until Wappler I have been going into Dreamweaver making a new page, inserting whatever DMX | Zone functionality I needed, then closing it all down, opening my file in Espresso and doing everything in code from there. I am a control freak and I own it.

Wappler to be honest also makes some edits, but it is Wappler edits, to Wappler extensions, in Wappler code, in the Wappler application, so i trust that what it does is not breaking things. Kind of like buying a car and taking it to the manufacturer for services, when something goes wrong I am not listening to stories of how mechanic X did this and having to prove who is wrong and who is right. With Wappler I feel this sense of trust, plus it is transparent, I can see what it is doing in front of my eyes, if I do not like it, I can change it, if I no longer feel like using Wappler I can take my code fully contained and functional into any text editor I like.

Rapid development wise I find it to be faster and more reliable than any software I have used before. For design I do feel that there might be applications I have used that equal or better the speed of the build in Wappler, however I never know what they are doing in the code, and even if I do, I generally do not agree with what it is doing, or how it is building what I want. Wappler builds and writes code exactly the way I would have done it manually 99% of the time, so to me it is fast, very, very fast.

For application development, in my opinion there is no equal, anybody in my opinion could make an application in this that would work to some degree, and for me who knows quite a bit of code in my head already, it does everything to perfection. I unfortunately do not have the time to learn every new development every single day, but with Wappler I can add a file upload to my website and just trust that the code it is using, has been tried, tested, debugged, and scrutinised by a client base of coders. If there were something not working to perfection in it, they would be made aware of it very quickly.

Having personally built by hand a system that could take an upload on an apache web server, place the file in a temp folder, move the file to the correct folder, delete the file etc. I can attest to how long this process takes. In Wappler I could build that same site that took me almost a month in about 2 days.

The thing I love about Wappler is possibly the strangest, this community forum, where a bunch of people with various levels of skill can come together and ask questions, and get informed answers. And if they don’t within a few short hours you can just type @George, @teodor, or @patrick and they kind of have to take you seriously. It is like having a team of professional developers in my office, and I am the boss, and can shout and scream like a brat if something is not working, even when it is me not using the software correctly, I can say, well you should have added that in the software, or, if your documentation was better I would have known that. So it’s a win, win situation for me. Although I do feel bad for them at times.

In a nutshell, Wappler is fast, it helps develop rapidly, there is support, it updates and fixes issues at great speed, and best of all it has saved me hours upon hours, which gives me time and money. I can dump the payment for my form software, for my Adobe tools, for my FTP client, for my other extensions. The savings for me come to more than the cost of Wappler. Pretty soon there will be video tutorials on many topics, there will be documentation that is complete, and support for all the questions we might have.

Thank you Wappler Team for an amazing tool, and for the courage in your mammoth undertaking…

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Thank you for sharing Paul! And for the compliments of course!

You have a great story! We will shorten it a bit for the website only - hope you don’t mind :slight_smile: - you always have the same problem with lengths :wink:

No problem at all. Lol. The story of my life. Haha

Wow, when does the full book come out, Paul? lol

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Mwahaha. I opened my wappler invite and the profile story I created already said. Long winded. You all knew what you were getting into. Haha.

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I think we can count this bit as @ben’s story:

Chad McComas Story

As the CEO of an agency, I’ve always had to ask myself how we can become more efficient, cut overhead, get new employees onboarded quickly, and keep pushing quality forward. Where web design & development is concerned, this has always been a thorn in my side.

To understand this, you should know that I’ve built over 2,000 websites since 1996. My clients have included micro-businesses, Inc. 500 corporations, and even the Fortune 500. In that time, I’ve used a vast number of web builders, written novels of PHP, HTML, and CSS, and spent a lot of time finding a way to meet all the goals we need as a company.

This has gotten easier as we move forward in time as there are more and more web builders popping up. There are many options available today and you would think I’d be happy about this, but I’m not. In truth, I find it all very frustrating.

For instance, at its core: WordPress is very simple and does a very specific thing. If you need anything above and beyond that though, you’re going to need plugins, themes, and theme-builders. On the surface, this sounds fine, but, it introduces a lot of inherent problems.

First off, there’s the issue of plugins and themes. Remember that every time WordPress is updated, the plugins and theme generally need to be updated too for security reasons. If the item is no longer maintained by the developer or the developer isn’t staying active with their cycle – this can seriously lead to your website not working, getting defaced, redirecting to phishing websites, spreading malware, or worse. And this is serious business because it seems that every time a system - that requires independently developed add-ons - is updated; It gets one step closer to failing.

Another issue is licensing. You can easily spend a small fortune on a website just getting all the plugins you need to do the job right. This is compounded by the fact that every plugin has a different licensing scheme, a seemingly arbitrary pricing model, and worse: Just because you bought a lifetime license doesn’t mean the plugin will continue to be maintained.

Let me step back for a moment and point something out here. Content-Management-Systems are extremely limited by nature. Consider that even robust theme builders like Visual Composer have a slew of additional plugins you can buy to add more functionality. In other words – plugins have plugins (and I’ve seen plugins of plugins have plugins too!).

These systems have a very limited scope of what they can do. To further prove this, consider that it is considered “best practice” to have plugins for standard things such as SEO, site speed, and security. To be clear: You need plugins to add standard functionality to these systems.

Don’t get me wrong; WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and other content-management-systems have their place. With a few minor exceptions, I just don’t think they are right for professional developers and designers.

That begs a question: What about online builders? There’s Wix, Weebly, Shopify, and a growing list of other online builders. How do these stack up? Well, the issue with these should be apparent. They are severely limited in what they can do, and sure, they have add-ons just like any CMS does, but you’ve already seen the problems that creates.

That leaves me with three more programs: Webflow, Pinegrow and Dreamweaver.

All three of these are the best option out there compared to everything I’ve mentioned thus far. Webflow and Pinegrow have a very streamlined interface that gives complete control over your CSS. In addition, Webflow allows you to create CMS items whereas Pinegrow allows users to design WordPress themes. Neither program allows truly dynamic content though. And as an aside – I really don’t like Webflow’s pricing model.

Dreamweaver, on the other hand, was headed in the right direction and then Adobe seemed to make some nonsensical decisions. First, they dropped a lot of important features from Dreamweaver and now, Adobe seems to have no real roadmap for web development in sight.

They tried Edge Reflow and Muse. Both seemed geared towards the same demographic as Pinegrow and Webflow, so it is a little curious that neither program became a serious investment of Adobe. Instead they dropped them rather quickly.

Their current offering outside of Dreamweaver is Spark Page. This seems to be an answer to the rise of the unqualified-expert. In other words, it seems that Adobe is trying to appeal to a mass audience with limited software rather than developing a superb program for a qualified audience. And as I said, their dropping major features from Dreamweaver and STILL not reinstating them is just a disaster.

That brings me to Wappler. Specifically, where does Wappler fit in this giant cobweb of builders and does it finally meet the call for a web building program that does everything well? The answer is yes, but let’s look at why this is a little deeper.

First, consider that a CMS is really just a CRUD application, right? You can create, read, update, and delete content with the added benefit of making it look pretty. As we become more and more reliant on the internet, we need the ability to innovate the way the web works – and dynamic content is where that is happening. Dynamic content is critical.

Wappler breaks out of the mold of these systems and allows the user full control over dynamic development. In fact, I cannot think of a single mainstream website that couldn’t be built with Wappler. This is incredible power to be had and the fact that it simplifies all this power is amazing.

Second you also have a very powerful CSS designer, as well as Framework 7 and Bootstrap 4. And none of this is limited or stripped down either. You are getting full-blown capability in Wappler to do what you want and to top it all off – you don’t need a single plugin to do it. In fact, let me put it this way: Every system or program I’ve ever used – I can do what that system specialized in with Wappler. And when I had to hand-code entire sites before because there wasn’t a solution available – I can do that also. This is fantastic and one thing I really love about Wappler is that it generates clean code that is not only secure, but that follows best practices as well.

Wappler also has a very fair licensing model, and more importantly, a very dedicated team that is active with their community daily. This last part is important because they listen to what their users say. If you want to see an addition put into Wappler or have a great suggestion, there is a strong likelihood that it will see the light of day.

What you should take away from this is that Wappler is a new program and already it can do significantly more than everything else out there. As I said, Wappler is also updated regularly with the intent of evolving rather than just bug fixes, and often these updates include user input.

If you want a program that can take your development to the next level - while cutting down on costs and improving efficiency – then Wappler is a great choice for you and your team to move forward. While there is a learning curve to the program, which should be expected, once you start to see how Wappler works, it will open an entire new world for you.

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Awesome Chad! You nailed it! The first two questions we always get on every exhibition we went with Wappler, from the new users were exactly:

  • How is Wappler different from Wix
  • How is Wappler different from WordPress

Now I can perfectly said - you answered those both completely! Even better than our selves :slight_smile:

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Well done Chad, brilliantly written. And maybe just as long as mine. Glad I am not alone in this world. Who else wants to join the long winded team.

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I’ll be doing mine in the next day or two. Too busy at the moment. But don’t expect anything near that length. lol

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Thank you George. Glad I could help. : )
Paul, you should see my love letters. The first woman to read a love letter I had written, I married. I couldn’t believe it.

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I think @Dave have a great user story as well! Hope he is up to speed with Wappler just as the powerful stuff he is done with the DMXzone extensions.

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My apologies for coming in late for the discussion, been rather busy trying to satisfy my customers.

@George, if you are happy with the story, please use it as my contribution. There is a whole lot more to be said, but we can keep that for a next edition.

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Wow thanks George. I’m hesitant to say we have not yet migrated to Wappler just yet. We do have a new Project coming up that will be solely developed with Wappler. I will endeavor to document the entire procedure from start to finish. Will begin with Database schema design, Security implementation, User management, Content management (CRUD), and Deployment to the server. Will try and feature some of the other tools we use such as Workbench, dbForge Studio, and some Server side tips and tricks for those that host their own developments (WHM, Cpanel, Apache, Modsecurity etc).

:slight_smile:

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Just paid for our Subscription :wink:

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Thank you again @psweb, @drymetal and @ben for your awesome stories!

Come on @brad, @TomD, @t11, @michele, @Hyperbytes, @pixlapps, @drymetal, @s.alpaslan, @jimatjude, @mrbdrm, @randyrie, @cavadini, @wld, @revjrblack, @paul, @terrytring, @brian, @oscreative, @turn3636

We need your story as well! Don’t be shy! :slight_smile: - share it with the world!

I’ll probably write something up this weekend. Won’t be near as long as the others. I’m just not that interesting to talk about. lol

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I’m not a native English speaker so i cant write a story but i will talk about my experience before wappler and after i used it for some time now.
i have been developing database driven websites for almost 10 years. my first program to use was Dreamweaver and as i remember it was able to get some simple CRUD website but as soon you want to go further then it become really time consuming and hard to manage and expansive. then i discovered DMX zone extensions and that made my life much better.

but still Dreamweaver was not that great to deal with. even with the extensions. so i left it and started looking for a better webapp builder.

i have tried so many programs and i eventually stopped using them. some where great but require you to sell your soul to afford it. some where too buggy to be used in anyway. and some didn’t offer any improvement over Dreamweaver.

i settled with a program for the last two years called AwareIM (1600$/y). and i developed a website and a mobile app using it. and although it was easy to use it lack the “flexibility” i need. it was a nightmare to do anything that it wasn’t build in it.

and here we are. i saw the kickstarter for wappler and waited (i wasn’t a believer :sweat_smile:)
wappler was promising too much functionality and almost free. it was too good to be true.

but as i used it more and more i just can’t believe how powerful this tool is. one of my biggest issue with wappler is that i keep redoing stuff. every time i have done a task i say to myself: i could do it even better!

surly as the program is still in the first year it need more polishing but it is powerful and usable.

the sky is the limit. there is tons of ways to accomplish the goal you have in mind. its more like drawing a painting now.

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Coming soon! Just a bit swamped with work in the week :grin:

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