Advanced Themer - Quality of life improvements

Advanced Themer is a popular add-on for Bricks.
It tweaks the Bricks builder, and adds amazing functionality and features that are quality of life improvements over the native builder from Bricks.

Cwicly team should consider incorporating those advanced features and tweaks from Advanced Themer to enhance the Cwicly builder and workflow.

From a cursory review of the features list, it appears that Cwicly already has them covered and from what I can see on their website, Cwicly does everything of significance as well or better.

If there are any specific features you had in mind that I may have missed, it is definitely worthwhile to raise them as feature requests.

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What @StrangeTech says is on point.
These plugins only exist due to the general lack of features, functionality, UI/UX, etc. of the actual main tool.

It might be an unpopular opinion, but the lack of available 3rd party plugins for a builder is rather a positive sign than anything else.

Cwicly already includes a dozen of these plugins natively because of its feature richness.
Not only hundreds or thousands of $ are saved, but the main point also which is much more important, is the native implementation. People probably won’t value this fact because they are used to bloating their installations for additional options.

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The Advanced Themer website doesn’t do it justice. It really is an amazing add-on. One must use it to get the essence.

The list of niceties and QOL improvements is much long to list, thus, I would suggest that the Cwicly team should consider using it with Bricks.
May be they would be inspired by it.
Nothing wrong with incorporating great ideas.

OK got you. Strange that they would miss valuable features on their marketing, given the preponderance of features listed there, but I will take your word for this.

Fully agree with this. I am fairly certain the Cwicly team also value incorporating great ideas given how many features they have added and how much they have listened to the feedback of their users.

Perhaps you can give an example of one feature you would like to see in Cwicly?

I couldn’t agree more with this. We tried many other builder plugins prior to Cwicly and aside from the basic lack of integration with Gutenberg, the second disqualifying factor was that to achieve anything beyond basic tasks required usually more than one add-on or plugin and in many cases these were paid.

Creating a growing eco-system that adds value is a desirable outcome and splitting a product into modular pieces can create a more optimised editing experience. When this process is done with forethought, it doesn’t have to be done with separate add-on products and as Cwicly demonstrates well, enabling/disabling features on a per-site basis using the settings and role editor has the same benefit.

To reiterate what @Marius said, the fact that Cwicly doesn’t need 3rd party add-ons for core functionality is a testament to how feature full it really is.

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I agree with the sentiments expressed here, that one mustn’t have to rely on third party add-ones, the builder itself must be feature rich.
Thus I am not advocating integration of Advanced Themer with Cwicly, but rather Cwicly getting inspired by some features of Advanced Themer.

Since asked, here are some of its many cool features,

  1. Class Manager
  2. Variable Manager
  3. Color Manager
  4. Tag Manager
  5. Class converter
  6. Style indicators
  7. Structure panel helper
  8. Loren Ipsum Generator
  9. Contrast checker
  10. X-mode

There are many more niceties but I reckon the above list would suffice the curiosities.

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I don’t have any doubts about it. Would be my 1st or 2nd pick if I used this particular builder.
While AT is a really powerful enhancement for Bricks, it wouldn’t impress me at all with Cwicly for the above-mentioned reason.

Your list doesn’t make a lot of sense either, as most of these features are already part of Cwicly, on the roadmap (confirmed as planned) or exist as Feature Requests (please vote for them and/or add your thoughts there).

This is my recommendation too:

I encourage you to create individual feature suggestions in case they don’t exist already.
A feedback thread helps (and is always good for discussion) but, in most cases, is too general and things might get missed.

I don’t get why people in this chat are being so defensive/passive aggressive.
I am not casting any aspersions on Cwicly.

What’s wrong at looking at someone else doing the same thing but differently and in a better way!

I merely suggested to the Cwicly team to have a look at a particular add-on.
I reckon the Cwicly team would get some great ideas in further improving the builder, thus the feedback.

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Definitely nothing like that, this conversation is purely to help establish what useful features can be added as you said.

This is the reason I asked which features you were referring to.

I think the sentiment here is that since these features (aside from the loren ipsum generator) are all already included as integrated features that work well in Cwicly, it is not yet clear what improvements/enhancements you are referring to.

We know the Cwicly team are very receptive to feedback and for it to be most effective it’s a good idea to distill a bit more detail of what exactly you want to see in Cwicly, so that they can make it happen for you. :bulb: :smile:

Let me illustrate my point by using an example of a Structure Panel.

Every page builder has a structure panel.
Even Gutenberg has a structure panel.
The Gutenberg structure panel is lacking in many aspects, and thus Cwicly developed its own structure panel.

If I had gone to the Gutenberg team and told them to have a look at the structure panel by XYZ builder, and that the structure panel of XYZ builder is better in many ways, the Gutenberg fans might dismiss me out of hand saying, whats the big deal about XYZ builder having a structure panel! Gutenberg has a structure panel too!

Unless the Gutenberg team actually uses the structure panel from XYZ builder, they would not realise that there are so many possibilities that exist to improve the Gutenberg structure panel.
No amount of writing letters and describing the structure panel of XYZ builder can convince the Gutenberg team/fans about the merits of the structure panel of XYZ builder.

In a similar vein, Cwicly has many features, already incorporated, on its roadmap or on its feature requests, but unless the Cwicly team actually uses the Advanced Themer add-on, they would never realise what Ideas are better implemented in that tool vs theirs.

Thus the feedback.
It is not a particular feature request for one particular feature, but rather a slew of features.
Cwicly team is a talented team of developers, and once they use Advanced Themer, they themselves might come to many conclusions and get some Ideas on how to better their own tool.

All page builders have Structure panels.
But not all Structure Panels are created equal.
The effort must be to have the best Structure Panel.

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I have to agree that most of this stuff is already present in Cwicly except the Lorem Ipsum generator and X-mode. I don’t necessarily think either of these missing things should be part of Cwicly either because you can already see the “x-ray” of the elements when you click on them and “lorem ipsum” is a really specific thing that you probably don’t always need and is easy enough to get elsewhere.

I do agree with adding quality of life improvements, but we probably need to be very specific about what they are and why they would be useful. Personally, I would like Cwicly to invest their time improving their existing blocks, for example, to make them even more robust (picture element support for the image block, tabs to accordion, crawling slider options [transition-timing-function], basic form builder [that can be integrated with automation tools like Zapier, Make, and SureTriggers], etc…).

Of course we all have things we personally want, so adding specific requests in the “Feature Requests” is probably the best way to get them out there.

While I agree that Cwicly are more than capable of doing that, one thing they excel at is gathering and listening to user feedback. As developers we often have to rely on our own perception of what is “better” and what works well and this is usually correct. On the other hand, the best way to truly look after your customers is to ask them specifically what they want and then deliver it.

From my perspective I would say the Cwicly team have exercised very good judgement in choosing the overall direction of Cwicly, which I respect greatly. With that said, many of the features didn’t just appear in v1, they evolved over time into the tool that we currently use.

To use your example of the Cwicly Navigator, yes indeed, it is an improvement in almost every way on the Gutenberg List View. And, this improvement is made up of many specific features, which were carefully crafted and honed over months based on feedback and suggestions on this forum. On occasion, users have different visions of how it can work and through (sometimes intense) discussion and sharing of these ideas, a consensus is reached that works for a greater portion of users.

This is why I highly recommend when using Cwicly to take some time yourself to work out what you want to see added and raise an individual feature request for each one. Personally I thoroughly reviewed the entire AT feature list and I could only find one or two minor things that I would personally benefit from to be added to Cwicly, which have already been requested.

Maybe there is something else that will benefit us all and your unique perspective may help the Cwicly team to add it.

I get it that one cannot appreciate a tool unless one uses it.
Here is the link for their YouTube channel.
Perhaps, videos would do more justice than his website.

https://youtube.com/@AdvancedThemer?si=7n3H6lBUCAbwTchP

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Yes, Advanced Themer is great and it has so many little qol features in structure panel alone, it is worth diving into, if one would like to learn from it. But as we can read, Cwicly is best already, so maybe no need. AT is loved by its users. I love it. So definitely worth a serious look.
Btw, once I asked for a feature and four hours later its developer delivered, in his holidays.

For example: QOL responsive design, there is a slider that allows you to see how the design shifts for each pixel size. Not jumping to the bordersize like 1100, 800, 568 and 345 for example, no you slide through the pixels and see the design shift - on the backend directly, for every size. That’s just great.

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I am very interested what specific features are the ones you appreciate the most.

Yes, awesome that this is available in Cwicly since the latest improvements to the breakpoints and responsive controls. :grin:

Its interesting because when i bought Advanced Themer, my intention was in order to make bricks as powerful as cwicly.
Then, the more i’m using it, I’m impressed by how Advanced Themer significantly enhances workflow. Its like have bricks in pro mode.
The developer also keep pushing new features quickly. I’m sure that there are lot of things that could serve as inspiration for cwicly.

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I’m curious which features you would like to see added to Cwicly.

Thanks for suggesting this. I too think Advanced Themer is pretty amazing and has a number of good quality of life improvements.

It seems, though, that there are enough differences between Bricks and Cwicly that we can’t just say “make the structure panel like the one in Bricks with AT enhancements.” Also, it seems like a big ask to have the Cwicly team buy Bricks and AT (assuming they don’t already own them), learn to use them and test the features, and then see what can be adapted, because they are working on Cwicly.

Perhaps a good way to bring some of the inspirational features from AT to Cwicly would be when we are using Cwicly if we see some place where AT adds something that would make sense and make life better, then suggest that as a feature. That way the requests are bite-sized and the benefit obvious.

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Hi Cwicly ppl! Maxime from Advanced Themer here. I didn’t expect to read about my plugin here :slight_smile: AT is specifically designed to solve/enhance Bricks features. AT for Cwicly would probably be totally different, since the pain points would be too. Anyway, just wanted to say hi and keep up the good work!

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