blocks VS craft.js

I've been building one with https://craft.js.org/ , tailwind, nextjs, and vercel, a few months into it I've got a decent component library, custom domains, subdomains, static pages, accounts, multiple pages, cdn and a bit more. The basics are easy to get going. Making it easy to understand/use, responsive, and all that, is a bit more complex.

As for the second part of your question, regarding UI. Reka is purely the state management system, so it is designed to help with storing/editing user content and computing an output for that content so you can render that on the browser; it’s not really responsible for the UI part. For building UI’s for your page editor - there’s Craft.js which is another framework that I built for creating page editors. Craft comes with an event system that lets you know which elements is being selected/hovered/dragged and a drag and drop system that lets you move elements around on the screen along with other things that helps you build your own page editor UI. Craft is actually the parent project of Reka. Reka was built to replace Craft’s internal state management system so that you could build entire UI components in Craft in the future. If you’re interested, you could check out the motivation and relationship between Craft and Reka here. As for the demo shown in the video, all the UI interactions (including some that you have mentioned like showing the borders of selected elements) are fairly straightforward, and they’re simply just interacting/mutating the AST state of Reka. Feel free to take a look at the code for the demo.

I think Craft.JS is exactly what you're looking for. The library author even used Grape.js as a starting point. I used this library to build a WYSWYG editor, similar to Webflow, and it worked really well.

We’ve been looking into craftjs for this use case since it seems to be more targeted at letting you build on top of it. https://craft.js.org/

i think that's how all no-code web editors like carrd, webflow, squarespace work i think (see https://github.com/prevwong/craft.js & https://github.com/artf/grapesjs)

If you're just talking about a WYSIWYG website page editor, check out https://github.com/prevwong/craft.js

Hmm, I guess it really depends on where you want to go. If you want a basic editor, sure, write your own, but I see you're integrating rows and columns. If you want to match current UX expectations, you gonna spend a shit ton of time to add things like drag and drop ordering, color and spacing controls, etc. If you want to have a full blown editing experience, I'd check out sth. like https://builder.io/ or https://craft.js.org/

I was planning on building something similar. My first attempt involved trying to get grapesjs to work with react. This attempt was very cumbersome because grapesjs generated html, and I would try to manipulate the html into react.

https://github.com/artf/grapesjs

Later however, I discovered craft.js, which is basically a framework for creating systems similar to this (page/component editors). Craft.js was inspired by grapesjs, but is specifically made for react.

https://github.com/prevwong/craft.js

Of course craft.js only solves the UI editor, not the code parsing/generation part. Babel is an obvious choice for code generation/manipulation, but I found its imperative approach unnecessarily complicated, so I built react-ast to enable declarative and composable code generation using react.

https://github.com/clayrisser/react-ast

The part I had not figured out was using the code as the source of truth for the editor and syncing it back. I definitely thought about it a lot, but postponed solving it since I had more pressing problems.

So, I have a lot of curiosity about this project. How does it work? And how does it stack up against a technology like craft.js? I noticed it’s not using craft.js, so I’m guessing the developers rolled their own equivalent.

Congrats, weweb.io definitely looks exciting.

For anyone interested, recently I had to research opensource visual page builder/websites options and these were top of the list:

https://github.com/prevwong/craft.js (React)

https://github.com/paperbits/paperbits-core (Full website, uses Firebase)

https://github.com/react-ui-builder/react-ui-builder-editor (React)

https://github.com/premieroctet/openchakra (Editor for Chakra UI)

https://github.com/BuilderIO/builder (Not sure if this really is open source)