Just a thread on weweb

Ask us anything
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Excuse me if I’m bothering you guys, but I just want to make this thread into some sort of discussion to discuss about weweb and its future.

INTRO:

Before stumbling upon weweb, i’ve been building sites with webflow, then one day I found that I need to make some simple CRUD with webflow, where I need to send to external database. I also need auth to work with it. I quickly found out that many people has the problem, and learnt about several solutions.

Webflow+Airtable+Zapier+Memberstack
This solution was made famous by Connor Finlayson, where he made a freelancer portal with this stack and shared the how-to extensively at youtube. Many people would follow and use this stack. There are several shortcomings with this stack, that is…Firstly, Zapier is expensive, Imaging every workflow is counted and charged. Second, although you use airtable, to create subpages you still need to use Webflow’s CMS, so you are not utilising Airtable as backend fully. Memberstack is a really nice app to use, no comments there.

Webflow+Wized+Airtable
Wized integrates with Webflow and airtable ok, and provide built in auth. The problem was, the functions weren’t extensive, and it is just too slow. In this day and age, if an app is too slow, it won’t work.

Bubble
The problem with bubble is the UI wasn’t customizable enough. Coming from webflow, it is a really big shortcoming. Other than that, they use their own CMS, means it wouldn’t scale.

8base
Wasn’t launched.

Weweb
Finally after going through all that, I found weweb. Weweb solves most of the problem above, a customizable UI, with extensive functions, and can be connected to any backend, very easily. Another thing I didn’t mention was UX and ease of use of the apps. Weweb’s UI/UX is just so great compared to the likes of Wized and Bubble. Having not much or no comparisons in the same category, I think weweb does really good job in structuring the builder. The way there’s collections, workflows, variables, components all just in the right place, very easy to understand and make sense. Weweb also expand beyond my imagination what no-code tools can do, whereas now I think you can built very robust app with it. Heck, @nicolatoledo.dev just rebuilt twitter.

Why I feel so strongly about weweb is also the fact that you guys build base on community’s feedback, and don’t hold anything back. Webflow is the most loved no-code tool, for a good reason, they turned coding in html and css into a visual builder. But everyone knows their shortcomings, where lately they always make company-motivated decisions not users-motivated. The recent issue with stacket was really bad. In the roadmap you guy’s are gonna allow users to host themselves and export code, that is a huge feature that represents weweb’s transparency and commitment to its users.

There is a shortcoming with weweb I want to address. To be fair, since I trust weweb so much, I think this and other issues will be fixed in no time, however I want to really get the priorities straight for you guys, that is why I make this thread. I hope everyone in the community would address their priority issues too.

The issue is performance and load speed. Weweb’s load speed is ok… but it isn’t fast. Even static sites are slow. If I open the docs, the link section loads slower than the static section, or the public roadmap page. Anyone can try put it on gtmetrix and it will show how bad it is. I think load speed is really important, way more important than additional features. That is why I am asking this would be the no.1 priority for you guys.

Other shortcomings are…Additional functions, where for now I think custom Javascript works fine. Custom css states, already in the roadmap. Custom animations(not really priority).

About components and plugin.
I think you guys should create a SDK and open platform where people can make components and sell/share it to others, or plugins as such. That way more values will be available to us users faster, also a community of users and builders will thrive in the marketplace. Additionally, a template, section marketplace.

One of the wonders of webflow is it allows web designers to use them as they scale, so even the most complex web designers are able to use webflow, as it has no shortcomings in the web designing world. I think weweb can be the same for web app/frontend developer. There are no reason you guys shouldn’t be considered by every range of companies if the speed is optimized and you guys have all the javascript function available. What you would do then only optimizing for the latest tech for performance or anything else. Weweb truly can change the frontend engineering landscape, allowing individuals or enterprises to ship better apps faster. I will root for you guys :+1: :+1:

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What a fantastic message to read on a Monday morning, thank you so much :hugs:
I think your analysis is very accurate. We plan to start working on improving the performances during the course of October and improvements should hopefully be felt in November. This will be a lot of work for us, not extremely visible at first, but hopefully will yield a better end-result for all the apps built with weweb.

As for the marketplace, this involves a bit of organizational complexity (as we’ll probably want to review plugins and adds-on in WeWeb before they are being shared to the whole community). So this will probably be a Q1 2023 thing.

For the rest of 2022, we will be focusing on the following, in chronological order:

  • Self-hosting
  • States
  • Staging environment
  • Dynamic collection pages (no queries in the URL anymore for these pages)
  • Performance improvements
  • Improve in-app logs to give a better understanding of what is happening in the app while building
  • Improve the “last mile” experience: fix discrepancies between the editor and the live app, improving UX for redirections, add in-app help when publishing fails, etc.
  • Classes (shared / re-usable styles)
  • Add backups & allow roll-backs
  • In // of all the above: regular UX improvements, more ready-made elements, more back-end integrations

Let us know what you think! We would be happy to hear the feedback of the broader community as well @kevinwasie, @kyanaloe, @caffeinatedwes, @dorilama, @stagiaire, @Patrice, @Anna.fae, @foliodc

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The roadmap looks very promising :slight_smile:

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Great thread.

As for the marketplace, this involves a bit of organizational complexity (as we’ll probably want to review plugins and adds-on in WeWeb before they are being shared to the whole community). So this will probably be a Q1 2023 thing.

I’m curious, @Raphael — is there a particular company or tool WeWeb looks to as a great example in terms of executing on building and supporting a plugin and add-on marketplace? Do you like how Bubble, Zapier, Webflow, etc. approach this?

I’m really excited about the roadmap. I’m particularly excited about the features and functionality that will make it easier for me to serve my clients, such as the staging environment, backups, and roll-backs.

  • In // of all the above: regular UX improvements, more ready-made elements, more back-end integrations

:nerd_face:

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We didn’t dig enough into this so we don’t have any preference yet! We’ll probably ask open questions to the community when we’ll start defining what we need to build for this marketplace :slight_smile:

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Love the roadmap! I’m just waiting for the performance improvement. I want to add though. The thing I like in these apps such as webflow and figma is the experience in using them. Going back using those apps, I get a really awesome experience, I think it is related to me realising that I am not restricted by anything while using those apps, such as to design a responsive sites with webflow and designing prototype in figma. I can’t do anything with pure html/css that I can’t do with webflow, that is why it is such awesome experience. I have the same experience with weweb. First time using it I realise you guys just translated pure javascript into visual form. The way I can create variables and easily edit them, the way to create a workflow , the way I can bind everything to anything, the way I can make a list from backend as easy as it is, connect to any REST API or backend such easy as it is. It is really an awesome experience. I think the amazing experience and just awe at the product overcome the shortcomings for now, such as the css states and the performance, as I think that can be easily fixed in the updates. I hope you guys don’t kid yourselves and market these as ‘MVP’ builders. Once you allow code exports, it is as scalable as javascript. Rock on guys.

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I am super excited by these three and personally 100% agree with your order of priority. Thank you team!!

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great input, thanks :star_struck:
@flo will keep that in mind while improving the product. We already started to work on accelerating a few transitions / animations to make the whole experience feels fast & smooth.

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I agree with a lot of the stuff people said here.

For myself, I find the performance to be pretty good. I’m not fully done with my app, but it seems manageable to me. I’ll report back later if I encounter any issues as I’m further along in the process.

I do want to mention that you guys have a pretty good-looking roadmap. It makes perfect sense to you as a company and us as developers. This product has all of the things I enjoy about different tools, all packed into one. How easy Elementor is to use, how complex you can get with it like Bildr, how visually appealing it is. I won’t go into much more detail, but WeWeb has all of the things you need to build a highly-performant app very, very easily.

The one thing I would like to see is some sort of a marketplace where builders can sell templates/plugins and integrations, or a bundle of an entire app with integrations to Xano, Supbase, etc.

That’ll help you scale so, so much faster. Webflow has a pretty good implementation of this, although they don’t have plugins. Bubble has a great plugin repository. WordPress has a plugin repository as well. Elementor (WordPress page building plugin) even has their own templating system where you can import templates via the builder.

I’d love for this to happen!

Either way, keep doing what you’re doing! WeWeb is awesome!

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Thank you very much for your input @franciscolora0524 ! Totally agreed and that will take a bit of time for us to implement as the marketplace will require us to do some reviews and enable sharing elements between workspace, transactions etc. But, given how great this would be, this is something we will work on soon and look to release a first version of a marketplace in Q1 next year.

Thanks for your support :smiley:

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Thanks @weweb-team and @Raphael for always being invested in user feedback.

I’m getting pretty close to actually launching my app, and the performance speed issue is starting to really show. I’m sure there are things that I can and will do to try to optimize on my end, like being thoughtful about how much and when data are fetched, but some of it just seems to be weweb. For example, changing pages sometimes takes too long, and users feel like they have to hit a button multiple times for it to work.

I’m still fully in awe of what you are doing, but I did want to weigh in on the performance improvements being critical, as well.

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Thanks a lot @kyanaloe for the feedback. We will start working on performance improvements in two weeks and, although it will be a long tunnel for us, you should start experiencing the results early November.

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Just a suggestion. I think weweb’s ease of use and our ignorance also makes us users ignore the need for optimizing our sites. Since we don’t have much knowledge about optimizing and what makes an app slow/fast, many are handling backend for the first time. One way weweb can help is to teach how to optimize sites, how to maximize performance using the workflows, such as functions and fetching, and also have a feature where you show builders what functions/fetching and programs are running in the background, so we can optimize and fix it

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Well said, definitely agree!

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Very good point! We will take this into account while creating the new version of the WeWeb academy. Thanks for sharing.

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Hey it’s been a few months since the last post on this thread, but I’d just like to chime in how absolutely important plugin reviews are!

My experience with Bubble’s plugin ecosystem has generally not been great. Many sub par plugins released, and many are broken for various reasons (such as when Bubble releases a new version that’s incompatible with the plugin).

While releasing my own plugins, I note that Bubble staff don’t actually enforce checks very stringently, just a quick QA to see if the happy path works. Plugin authors should be made responsible to maintain their plugins and the marketplace owner should delist plugins that no longer work - or not allow them in the first place.

Just adding my voice to this, as I hope to be part of this ecosystem for a long time to come.

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Great looking roadmap! I’m especially eager for the dynamic collection pages - I think it’ll make WeWeb a frontrunner for building marketplaces and platforms where data changes constantly. Combined with the speed improvements discussed here, WeWeb really can be THE tool for building almost any web app.

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Thanks a lot for the inputs. We agree with you, this will be hard to execute, but it sounds like an exciting challenge. We are hoping to have the first version of the marketplace by the end of Q1.

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Awesome, thanks @karlso! The dynamic pages should be in production in 2 to 3 weeks :slight_smile:

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Please add the block time/date(bind data) in date/time picker. Appointment webapp needs it. Hopefully it is not a lot of work for your team.

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