MotoPress - Yet Another Drag and Drop System?

MotoPress – Yet Another Drag and Drop System?

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There are 11 comments

April 4, 2013 #

Chris Langille

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of D-n-D’s either, however despite all the negative press surrounding Thesis 2, I think it’s one of the easiest, and powerful D-n-D’s out there, and I’ve tried all of the big “players” in this space (Headway, Pagelines).
April 4, 2013 #

Edward McIntyre

Personally I dislike any Drag & Drop system. Then again as a design I also dislike WYSIWYG editors. This great for a personal site, or a designer that manages sites, but I would never pass this functionality over to a client.

Mo options, mo problems.
April 4, 2013 #

Sara Ch.

Call me a code snob, but I think if you want to design with WordPress, you should just dig in. I feel like drag-and-drop is cheating and also a good way to end up with clunky code that bogs down your site. With all the amazing tutorials available online, you can learn enough in a long weekend to get you started on the backend of WordPress. After that you just need a solid parent theme and the courage to edit a few PHP files to code your own site without d-n-d shortcuts.

In my experience, everyone eventually reaches a point where there just isn’t a drag-and-drop cheat or plug-in to get something on your site to look like or do what you want it to. If you’re using d-n-d then most likely you don’t want or can’t afford to pay a professional designer to code your site. This leaves you with two options: go out and learn how to do it yourself or stupidly give up on whatever cool idea is sitting in your brain. So since you’re going to end up needing to jump into those PHP files at some point, you might as well just start learning the backend as soon as you adopt WordPress.

Sara
April 5, 2013 #

Christine

I’ll “wait and see”… for real designers, and real coders, probably not a solution, but if you have some local, small businesses, that just simply need to be online, since 98% of folks find businesses that way, it might be a simple and fast solution to offer them… and then manage it for them… as needed… or small monthly maintenance/hosting fee.

I’d like to see how it works… anyone know when it is scheduled for launch?
April 5, 2013 #

Christine

I’ll “wait and see”… for real designers, and real coders, probably not a solution, but if you have some local, small businesses, that just simply need to be online, since 98% of folks find businesses that way, it might be a simple and fast solution to offer them… and then manage it for them… as needed… or small monthly maintenance/hosting fee, or just need something fast… I like to design, but not a fan of coding.

After watching the video, I am really intrigued with some of the functionality… even being able to simply switch between pages (a big gripe for me with WP)…. and more easily working with modules on the fly, and more… So, in that regard, am anxious to see how it all plays out.

And, I’d like to get a chance to see how it all works… anyone know when it is scheduled for launch?
April 5, 2013 #

Agence Elysium

WordPress has an easy learning curve, so there’s no need for less-efficient and buggy d-n-d frameworks. If it was for Drupal, that would have been more interesting I think, too bad there’s a much smaller audience.

Also, I don’t know if somebody mentioned it, but themes based on d-n-d tend to be heavier (too much css and javascript)
- April 7, 2013 #
  
  Ryan Hellyer
  
  There is no reason that would need to be the case. They also don’t need to be slow.
  
  The problem is that most of them are slow, but that’s due to design flaws in specific implementations rather than an inherent problem with the concept.
April 17, 2013 #

Justin Korn

I don’t have much experience using DND plugins or themes. I’ve demoed PageLines and Headway and found a steep learning curve to both for the average user.

MotoPress reached out to me recently and provided me a demo. It is way too early to tell how well it will work and who would use it. There are still lots of bugs and issues, and overall it’s just not functional yet (nothing like what the video makes it out to be). We’ll see where they go with it, but for now, it’s nothing for dnd enthusiast to get excited about.
- April 17, 2013 #
  
  John Saddington
  
  we gave it a try and it borked hard too. they are working to make it much better.
  
  the experience was so bad we emailed them in advance to let them know that we didn’t feel right about posting our experience… 🙂
April 18, 2013 #

Kevin Gross

I have developed WordPress themes over 3 years and the most significant problem that came under my experience is to help my clients to support their themes and not almost always I earn money on this. At the current moment WP enables to edit pages’ and posts’ content and the TinyMCE editor is really easy to use, but embedding the shortcodes is a huge hassle for end users. Even if the client knows how to use shortcodes he nevertheless collide with the editing problems.

But what about those site elements which are encoded into the theme and can be changed only by editing raw files, or page template files? For the great amount of clients it becomes a real problem. Sure there are such projects I don’t want to give the access to the client, and do not allow them to edit the template cause I can earn extra money on every change (in most cased such clients even don’t know how admin panel looks like, cause they never use it) But also there are clients who can do the most part of work themselves and ask only for deep updates and modifications but they can’t cause it’s not handy. I really like the functionality of website editing that offer non wordpress builders like Wix.com and Squarespace.com and looking forward if someone brings such kind of functionality to WordPress.

I think this idea is really actual to the WordPress templates developers, f.e. guys on Themeforest which spend much time on solving support issues cause their clients are mostly end users with different WP experience.
April 26, 2013 #

Nick

I personally am a BIG fan of DnD. While we still do a ton a modification and custom coding, Headway and Catalyst + Visual Composer allow us to work extremely fast. And if you want to make $40K+ a month as a web designer, you’ve gotta work fast AND turn out a great product. If I’m charging only $15,000 for a custom WordPress site, I’ve gotta get it done in less than two weeks or I’m losing money. DnD allows me to hit those targets consistently while only working a few hours a day, rather than working ’til 5am every night for only a couple thousand dollars a week (which is what I used to do).

How do you stay on top of your WordPress game?