craft.js VS openchakra

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.

https://craft.js.org/ - This is probably more like what you're looking for. It's in heavy development still and does lack some features but you can use it with reactive components.

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/

Does anyone have some recommendations? https://craft.js.org/ something like this, but not with HTML.

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

Are you using opencharka[0] then? I investigated that a while ago and was not very impressed or happy with any code that it generated, but curious to see if you've figured something else out.

[0] https://github.com/premieroctet/openchakra

Do you know of any open source drag and drop builders? I would love to be able to create my own components and drag and drop to combine them. If you know of any that are React specific, that would be great, but any builder would be helpful.

One example that I know of is https://openchakra.app/ for React apps that are using Chakra UI.

The original idea and inspiration for the Crayons Playground came from the full-featured visual editor and code generator for React using Chakra UI called openchakra. All the underlying architecture, code organization and design & communication patterns are borrowed from openchakra. The only difference is Crayons Playground doesn't make use of any JavaScript framework whereas openchakra is completely built using React.

In a nutshell, I wanted to easily add in all the components / design system from Material UI or Ant Design into the drag and drop interface, so I can play around with them, in a way similar to https://openchakra.app/

I started doing some mock-ups in my brain. Then I recreated some of them on Figma and then decided to start building. I started with OpenChakra (because I am using Chakra UI, more on that later).

Would you two be able to share some take-aways from that conversation at some point? Maybe write up a short comparison of the projects as they are now and any differences in roadmap/vision that could be relevant.

I always appreciate when OSS projects put in effort to understand and position themselves in relation to competitors (or potential collaborators).

Also want to mention some open-source React visual drag and drop page editors that might be useful for inspiration or to eliminate possible duplicate work. There's OpenChakra [0] and Blocks [1], which are apps, and then there's craft.js, a library that aims to modularize "the building blocks of a page editor" and seems to have more emphasis on customizing the actual editor UI.

Best of luck to you both!

[0] https://github.com/premieroctet/openchakra