I am still hoping, that this fantastic product will be continued in some way. As for now, I have to consider either to go with native WordPress FSE, or to a different pagebuilder.
As I am not a professional developer, and I am just building websites for my own purpose and not for clients (thus there is no need for me to have an industrialized development process and integration with such tools), what is the best pagebuilder heading to? Is it Bricks or Breakdance, or something else? Should be well aligned with WordPress core, and at some point later on for me a good WooCommerce part of that builder might get important to me.
If for now, I am just going with pure WordPress FSE, are there any ideas how to migrate websites build with Cwicly to WordPress Core?
Well I still hope the great stuff from Cwicly will somehow survive end of 2024. So maybe wait a bit longer before jumping ship with old builds.
A possible way to go is with Bricks (and using Structeezy addon to pars Cwicly pages into theirs, like a copy’n’paste experience, though dynamic things I did not try yet.)
The best tool is the one that fits yours, and your project’s needs. There is no right or wrong answer to that question I’m afraid. It’s a matter of preference, and need.
Unfortunately, from my view, Cwicly has some features, and functionalities that are unmatched, and can’t be replaced by a single alternative tool for my use case. I’m having to compromise, and combine more than one tool. This means accepting limitations, shortcomings, and risks.
I you wish to stay pure Gutenberg/FSE, i.e. without any external block addon, it’s gonna be complicated, unless you’re OK coding: some solutions have been mentioned in another group, based on building one’s own Gutenberg blocks from custom fields (which could easily behave as components as well), which I found interesting, but which could be, regarding site complexity, a ton of work.
I personally would rather go the plugin way, at least for some complex stuff that I know I can’t code myself. For indeed, FSE and Gutenberg are now decent and you can easily template almost everything.
I find Greenshift a good candidate, even if when digging a bit I encountered many design and ergonomic – non fatal – issues. Very light, very smooth UI, seamless FSE / Gutenberg integration, loads of features, all in all very capable and pretty innovative in some ways (easy slide everything, automatic horizontal mobile scroll, SVG shapes/masks, etc.).
That said, I didn’t have the best experience with their FB group. Nothing compared to Cwicly support and community. So I’m afraid I can’t move as fast as I want if I need to rebuild a lot.
I wish the negativity towards Louis from Oxygen would stop. It’s the same negativity that killed Cwicly, doesn’t help anyone.
Louis from Oxygen made a business decision, it’s his product and his money so it’s up to him. I didn’t agree and wasn’t happy as an Oxygen user but I’m not going to cancel or boycott him over it. He’s a nice guy as well. He’s actually done a really good job with Breakdance and he’s a talented developer with deep enough pockets to sustain it for the long term. He’s built it right so for a traditional builder it’s right up there with Bricks on my consideration list. Maybe even ahead because I think Breakdance Louis will definitely be doing in 5 years but very uncertain about Bricks.
Greenshift is too small and uncertain so I guess either Generate Blocks, Breakdance or Bricks but really want to stick with blocks over traditional builders which often have problems with plugins I need to use.
I’m just saying maybe look into it rather than… I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole. The hate he got was very overblown. The fact he didn’t give up and has succeeded expectations with Breakdance is proof he’s here to stay. It’s a solid product and he did less damage than here. He explained why, did interviews, and handed Oxygen over to another developer. He’s clearly fully committed and not just going to abandon it. He’s a nice guy too, he’s been doing it for a long time, very talented, fully committed, has the money to keep it going so its well worth anyones consideration. Thankfully the negativity didn’t stop him.
Is it possible to stop the tribalism? Or do we really need to keep following the same pattern?
These are just tools. We are not talking politics, religion, or football. Use the one you prefer. There is absolutely no need to put anybody down just because you didn’t like something or someone’s attitude.
Breakdance, Bricks, Oxygen, Cwicly. They are all capable tools. Use the one you prefer the most, let everyone else use theirs as well.
Try to show some respect, even if someone doesn’t deserve your trust anymore. We can be better. Let’s make some effort to be better, how about that for a change?
Indeed, adventurous with just 5 months on the market, and themeum behind it seems also be behind Qubely, which has been a mess from my experience. But that does not necessarily mean, that Droip is that too, seems to be a different and fresh editor experience.
This tool have components and it is difficult to beat, Also the ability to edit posts from the builder itself makes a unique selling proposition.
I think that’s it, i have not much hope for the future of cwicly because it already shown how it can fail even for if I understood well “emotional” reasons and as @msguerra74 said already, it all comes to remind us of breakdance/oxygen thing.
I was about to buy breakdance but i saw the disrespect or disinterest with which the other louis treat his customers, so yes once trust is harmed its difficult to win not only the respect of your customers but the trust of new ones.
For this, it’s sad to know that even if @louis change his mind to develop the tool again, there is going to be trust issues for cwicly to gain momentum and find profitability.
The only tribalism I can see here is each one of the customers trying to find their sweet spot e.g. What better suit their needs. Meaning what can we use for the long term, applying it to client or personal work, with the features that improve our workflow the best and for a good price.
I would be happy buy them all but it doesn’t make sense to have more than two “real” options under your portfolio, or it would be a waist of time and money.
I can see that too, but I’m also seeing people polarizing opinions, and making bold statements about someone who isn’t even part of the discussion. That’s unnecessary, not to mention it’s also exactly what was indicated as one of the causes for the discontinuation of Cwicly’s development.
Would be great to see a live where those causes of discontinuation are fully disclosed to all cwicly users, we all deserve it, I could be too stupid for all that matters but its a bit foggy in my dumb mind you know… I don’t quite get it. I mean this is not politics or religion, this is just business.
After exploring every available option this week, unfortunately I’m not surprised.
Nothing actually has changed really in the last decade or so.
Builders just don’t want to evolve, it’s just the same situation as before Cwicly launched.
Or is it the users that want to build websites forever like that? Maybe.
I’m convinced though that other tools will pick up Cwicly’s ideas over time and their users will celebrate them as innovative. Yes, these users that trash talked Cwicly exactly for that non-stop.
I’m feeling lost in the WP universe and I’m finding myself in a situation that I believed I finally had escaped.
Builderius is the only option that could be something when they release their v1.0.
At least in theory. Not sure if I I’m ready to potentially waste years of my life again.
Because that’s the risk one takes. And waiting years to see how it progresses. Not sure.
I will focus more on my custom projects where I have 100% control and zero risks.
I’m also sitting on a shit ton of designs and themes that I created with and for Cwicly over the last 1+ year. The theme import/export which was “next” on the roadmap, was the only missing part to get started. An entire waste.
I might take some time off to reconsider some things.
As the product has no future, it’s likely that I’m saying goodbye to this community in the foreseeable future.
Sad to read that youre planing to jump off, but of course, totally understandable.
I am kind of in the same situation, but my conclusion was the following: keep doing small to small-medium sized projects in cwicly and for all the medium and large scale projects im leaving Wordpress in favor of directus. Played a lot with it the last week (just started to do a Webshop I’ve planned for cwicly with it) and it feels like it has everything needed to have a good management system in the backend but don’t rely to much on anyone. The database table look (except the internal) exactly as I defined them in directus, so I feel like there is not a very big lock in effect. I’ve planned for a longer time to do more projects in headless and played around with several headless cms in 2023, but there was no need to use it so I didn’t dive that deep into them…
But I don’t want to give up on cwicly to be honest… I’m still hoping that, in a few months, everything is forgotten and work keeps going on. If not, it’s ok for me to have a few small projects inside of cwicly.
Sorry this just isn’t true. He made a business decision to go after a bigger market and he was completely up front about it. He faced up and did interviews explaining it all in detail and he handed Oxygen over to another developer. I was massively disappointed with his decision but that’s what businesses do. He did it as respectfully as he possibly could and he was anything but disinterested.
I assume most users do.
And a community with only a couple of people isn’t worth it to put time in anyway.
I don’t expect much help or support from users to help others.
It might take a bit, but activity will decrease over time and eventually end.
If they would add some missing features, I would seriously consider to do that as well.
Exporting Cwicly projects to static sites is the least in this situation, to offer users some exit in worst case. I think this was planned.
I’m not interested in 3rd party solutions.
TW is missing global block styling, and availability of inaccessible block instances to add classes. This is crucial when using TW for a project.
No theme import/export. I’m not willing to start every time from freakin’ scratch.
No variable manager/inserter.
Some other features are just unfinished, too.
I’m not asking for major stuff like the interactions rework.
I’m actually asking for nothing, just giving the reasons why it’s difficult for me.
I can’t see any scenario how they could just return. I think they’ve burnt themselves for WordPress. At least for the general/average community.
But I also can’t see how 4 years can be just thrown away. The effort they put in, it’s rather like 6-8 years.
I would see them rather coming back as a saas or enterprise solution, like Webflow - maybe with their own twist.
Or as a WordPress premium solution for real agencies. So they don’t have to mess with all these idiots again.
They just might have placed themselves in the wrong category, targeting the wrong audience.