So I consider myself to be pretty comfortable with a computer, programming, and design that I can give a pretty honest opinion when using a new application. I’ve tried quite a few web editors in the past, and I’ve settled on using Bootstrap Studio for probably the last year since it had the features I needed at the time. When I heard about Blocs a couple of months ago I was eager to give it a shot, and for me, the best way to try out a new web editor is to just do a simple test rebuilding my current website with it. What I did find was Blocs was amazingly fast and intuitive when it came to laying out my structure. But the things that I don’t quite like, or understand, are probably the only things holding me back from making a complete switch to Blocs.
- Smart Forms - Not sure if this makes sense, or how Bootstrap Studio did it but they were able to incorporate a “smart” form option that will take all the entries from the form and send them to an approved email address (probably through some mail server on their end). It just makes setting up the contact form part so much faster and easier.
- Class Manager Issues - The custom class manager is a cool little tool for visualizing most of the CSS attributes, but it does have a few problems with how it structures the code/works. First, you can’t set a background Image and a Background Color at the same time, since the code puts the two items on separate lines only the background image is respected. Adding Borders to just a single side also doesn’t work in the Class Manager. It doesn’t really make sense on how to add borders, but even if you just click on one border icon and then set the border, it adds borders to all sides. It just needs some re-tooling to work correctly.
- Out of date icons - Fontawesome is pretty out of date now, and it would be nice to be able to either upload a custom icon font file or update the existing ones when they go out of date. Uploading an SVG icon works, but then you lose the icon functionality that comes built into Blocs when you use the built-in icon fonts.
- Icon Styling - Much like the Class Editor issues, the icon’s styling options are hard to use. One great example is the outline option, for some reason the outline added is always quite large and there is no way to adjust the size of the outline.
So yeah, just a few things I’ve noticed. Outside of those things, I was pretty much able to get about 90% of my website done in about 8 hours of time after playing with Blocs for a week to get comfortable with it. I think it’s a great tool, would love to switch over to Blocs as my permanent editor, but for now due to the types of projects I get and the issues I’m currently running into I can’t make that jump just yet.
