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Makeswift 2.0 — No code meets Next.js
Makeswift 2.0 lets developers integrate handcrafted React components into a visual builder designed with their marketing team in mind. Get set up in minutes and integrate pages at your own pace – no need to wait for your next website overhaul.
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Huge congratulations on the next release to the whole makeswift team!
Been an user of makeswift for years now and always been impressed by the quality of their product!!!!!
Congrats on the launch team 🎉 So excited to see how the new direction works out for your company. Narrower is better!
Great product, fantastic team. Been waiting for this since v1.0... huge release @appledger !!
Thanks, @michael_sengbusch1! You're an OG and we appreciate your continued support!
Makeswift 2.0 is a great tool for developers who want to build beautiful and functional websites, but are not familiar with the coding process. The software lets you easily create professional-looking, full-featured websites without any programming knowledge at all. It makes it easy to quickly get your website up and running in minutes or hours by using templates that have been created by other designers or developers.
Congrats on the launch! Love seeing a product tackle a critical problem at the intersection of code and no-code :)
We've been working towards this vision for quite some time now, so it's exciting to finally unveil this today.
10 months ago we launched our multiplayer, no code builder where you could quickly launch a Next.js site in minutes. The downside was that the components available to build with were limited to the ones we designed.
That changes today.
With Makeswift 2.0 you can swap in your own Next.js host and provide your own React components for your team to build with. In addition, we've added tons of new features like animations and global elements, as well as overhauled the entire UI.
We've been working closely with the team at Vercel to build the best possible visual builder for the Next.js community. As long time members, we understand what Next.js developers want: performance, fast setup, and clean APIs.
That's why we've made it so you can integrate Makeswift into an existing Next.js app and migrate 1 page at a time, or just use it for new landing pages. It will work side-by-side with your existing tools so you can start unblocking your marketing team without any refactoring or rewrites.
All of this without compromising on the performance you know and love.
Publish up to 5 pages for free and try Makeswift today. We're pumped to see what you all build!
Big thank you to @rauchg for supporting and hunting us.
Thanks @mrahmadawais ! Happy to answer any questions and would love to hear feedback. We're working hard on making the UX and DX better and better every day 😄
This looks incredible. our team can't wait to integrate this deeper into our Next.js site. great work @appledger @ollermi
@ollermi @fadi_francis1 Thanks Fadi! It's been such a treat working with you and the Recurrency team.
Congrats to the Makeswift team! We're currently working on two separate projects that integrate Makeswift to help the marketing team publish content more consistently.
Uh interesting. So that’s like builder.io with the difference that you can BYO components to provide marketing to start off with?
That’s a good approach.
Checked out the builder and there are some restrictions (eg I wasn’t able to load a custom font).
I wonder:
If marketing wants to customize the appearance of a component — this needs to be ultimately implemented by the dev on the component before marketing can then use that in the visual editor, right?
Or how does the flow work when a a user of the editor wants to customize my custom provided component?
Hi @richardpoelderl !
That's exactly right! It's BYOC and we've also got some components that are built-in by default so that you don't need a development team to get started.
As far as loading custom fonts in the builder, it's something that's in our roadmap. There's two workarounds for now:
- You can use our Snippets feature to add custom fonts
- You can use a custom host and add fonts like you would in any Next.js app
With regards to marketing wanting to customize the appearance of a component: Yes, the component ultimately exposes a props interface that allows it to be customized. This gives the developer full control of what should and shouldn't be customizable. We make it very easy with our controls (e.g., `Style` https://www.makeswift.com/docs/c...) for a developer to decide what can be overwritten.
That being said, we provide all the basic building blocks needed to build a site: Box, Text, Image, Button, and more. So a marketer really only needs the developer to expose functionality when it's a custom component (i.e., a form that talks to an internal API).
We're also working on a `Slot` control which will allow developers to leverage component composition so that marketers can drop any component inside the component the developer built. This results in a combinatoric explosion in variety. For example, a developer could build an animated carousel component and have each slide use a `Slot` so the marketer has full control over what goes in each slide and can use any other component available to them—including the default built-in components! If the developer wants to, they can even expose different animation options, or they could opt not to.
@ollermi
Yeah Slots with BYOC is a game changer. Imagine if that worked with radix (which use the composable components pattern), how well you could provide components without having to depend on whatever the builder supports for the provided components. 😍
Does Style also expose atomic css via tailwind for example? I could see how marketers learn tailwind instead and thereby having full control over the appearance. If something breaks, devs can restrict class usage of tailwind if preferred.
Oh and by the way: kudos to your pricing model. Having the custom domain on the free tier is really nice. In fact, I think your pricing model is so nice I was surprised not to see a screenshot in the carousel here on ProductHunt.
@richardpoelderl
100% You can use Radix today with Makeswift! At the end of the day it's all just React components all the way down.
We're working on making `Style` use atomic CSS for performance reasons but we're also exploring integrations with libraries like Tailwind so that if you have a Tailwind config you can easily expose that to your marketing team. Think colors, shadows, typographies and other Tailwind design tokens available in the Makeswift `Color` control, `Text` control, etc.
And thanks on the kudos on pricing! We've iterated on it so so much and we're very happy with where we're at. We think it aligns well with what the developer community expects while still being inclusive of no-code users that want to start with a small site and grow with us!
@ollermi
Quite exciting. I’m curious if you’ll implement the tailwind integration. Would love to see that but understand that it hasn’t been implemented just yet in the Style api.
@richardpoelderl
The `Style` API is intended to provide a class (or multiple classes). What we'll probably do is allow the developer to define a list of classes, which can be Tailwind classes, to also include in the prop controlled by `Style`.
That being said, you can Integrate Tailwind with Makeswift today by using the `Select` control: https://www.makeswift.com/docs/c.... In the code you can map values from `Select` to Tailwind classes. For example, a value of `'primary'` could map to `'text-sky-500 text-bold ...'`. This can get tedious, though, so we're looking to work with our community of developers to better understand how they would want to expose their Tailwind config visually to their non-technical peers.
If you have any ideas we'd love to hear them! We've go our open-source package at https://github.com/makeswift/mak... and also have a Discord community at https://discord.gg/hwm33EJa
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