Plasmic – A headless page builder | Hacker News Reader

Plasmic – A headless page builder

github.com

105 pointsmosr25 comments

At the first read it seems to be the silver bullet we've been all waiting for:

Code, design and content mashed up in a way nobody has to do (almost) nothing, and it just spits out stunning web stuff in half-time. A win-win-win situation.

I guess I'll take a nap and I'll come back.

This as open source would be great. When you see a github link you assume it is, or is that just me?

It looks like the project is released under the MIT license, judging from the LICENSE.md and the license information in the README.

The editor is not open source, it's just a client SDK towards their API.

Looks cool. These sort of block editors are definitely the standard for building pages these days.

Does anyone have any real world experience using it with Vue?

EDIT: Nevermind. There doesn't seem to be a fully self-hosted option for the editor.

As long as it’s still difficult to create a (usable & reliable) site editor, these services will keep being subscription only.

It annoys me when they try to make it look open source but it’s only a glorified api client.. same with builder.io [0]

[0] https://www.builder.io/m/visual-cms

Really not trying to mislead/annoy - Plasmic's client libraries are open source and on GitHub, but not the visual editor currently. Will add clarification to the repo, but any other suggestions are welcome.

In what sense "headless"?

Seriously why are they calling this headless

(Copying response from elsewhere)

It's headless as in "headless CMS" - Plasmic is decoupled from your frontend stack, which you run and own. The content you design is delivered via API into your site/app.

Very, very cool. I've been needing something like this to help out a no-code friend.

Also I made a minor PR https://github.com/plasmicapp/plasmic/pull/25

Also did that from bed on my mobile while binge-watching TV. I like living here in the future

I dont understand what this means:

""Create stunning visual content and pages, seamlessly integrating no-code into your codebase. Unblock your teams and ship lightning fast""

Is this a visual web editor that come with vendor / hosting lock in? (+ hooking into web hooks)

It's the opposite - it has no vendor/hosting lock-in. You run and own your own frontend stack, hosting, etc. Plasmic is a visual editor that plugs into your stack.

The pricing page defines how many page views you can have

https://www.plasmic.app/pricing 10K monthly page views 250K monthly page views

If they dont handle hosting the page themselves do they have code to record every pageview on my server stack?

The API-based integration does track impressions. Besides that, you can also use codegen, which doesn't.

I was ready to open my wallet, then saw it was "pseudo open source".

Shame. Looks really cool.

Hard to tell if the designer app comes with the github repo. https://github.com/plasmicapp/plasmic

This seems like a closed source version of tinacms or am I wrong?

It's different from TinaCMS because it's a full free-form page builder/web design tool. The developer doesn't need to write any CMS template/schema code.

TinaCMS is like other headless CMSes with visual editors, where you're limited to using blocks that developers need to code up.

(Both support Markdown text content editing and drag/drop of your own components.)

Has anyone used some of these in production? Tina, Builder, Storybloks, React Bricks, or this one? Curious what the experience is like.

You may be interested in https://plasmic.app/casestudies. Note that Plasmic is different from these because it's a full free-form web design tool, so it doesn't restrict you to blocks that also have be authored by developers.

I don't know what headless means here.

You interact with it through a web browser. So the server software can be installed on a computer without a display.

It's technically correct I guess, but not terribly relevant.

you don't need display

rack servers etc

It's headless as in "headless CMS" - Plasmic is decoupled from your frontend stack, which you run and own. The content you design is delivered via API into your site/app.

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