A Look Back At Wappler on 2021 Eve + Wishlist

Hi All.
I have been a developer since school, playing around with various technologies and platforms - nothing fancy though, just the regular ones - PHP, ASP, C#, Java, MSSQL, MySQL and otheres. Before Wappler, I was either using Visual Studio IDE for .NET stuff or Notepad etc for PHP.
@nshkrsh and I started our company in 2015 and had been using VS or PHP for everything in the beginning. We also divulged into Webflow for the UI end of things for a couple years, before we found Wappler in December 2018.

I had never used Bootstrap before. Had never used Dreamweaver. Never ever heard of DMXZone.
Getting on board with Wappler with the limited docs was a challenge. I took on a small project with a single pager front-end and a back-end admin panel with a few pages and not too complex functionality.

In initial days, I was not doing very well with Wappler and was expecting it to take ~50% more time than if I would have used my previous tools. But, when I started on the back end, I pretty much saved 70% of my time there!! :exploding_head:
So, overall I ended up putting in about 10-15% extra time with Wappler, because I was learning and building. The time saved in back-end was enough for us to ditch Webflow and to struggle and learn Bootstrap a bit more and use only Wappler for our projects going forward.

Over the course of few more months, we worked on few more projects, learned a lot more and started to feel a bit more comfortable. Later we got a project (which is still on-going :crossed_fingers:) via community here. That helped us make use of many more components of Wappler (we still haven’t used all in the past two years) and understand a few inner workings too. This project has evolved into a huge complex application which someone might not even believe is built on Wappler if shown to them now (although we can’t :shushing_face: ). Same can be said for some of our other Wappler projects too.

The past two years with Wappler have been great :star_struck: and we are still learning things (still docs are lacking) about Wappler and making our projects better.
I would like to thank the Wappler team for their support here in community, and for implementing great ideas in Wappler and making it feel like a much more mature product in the past two years.
Many other community members have been really helpful too - weather it is providing help and solutions on our posts, or posting bugs and how-to-s from their experiences which have been helpful to us.

We as a team have tried to help a few of the members too and have also shared our experience as a paid service with one-on-one sessions (DM @nshkrsh for details. #shameless-plug :grin:).
We have added a few more clients and grown our team a little in the past two years too. And are happy to say that our focus is completely on delivering secure, easy and good web apps via Wappler :pray: .

A wishlist for Wappler team in 2021:

  1. Add more people to the team. Mainly for support and docs.
  2. Take a backseat on weekly feature updates and shift resources towards support and cleaning up the community’s stale posts and pending bug fixes. (I assume the team has a road map on features they wish to add, but if it can be adjusted…)
  3. Setup weekly updates to be something like-
    1st Week: Release Feature updates.
    2nd & 3rd Week: Focus on Bug fixes, community clean up, work on other feature updates in beta channel (ref. point 5).
    4th Week: Focus on creating missing docs and new docs for next week’s feature update. (New docs have been usually on-point with new features since past few months :+1: ).
  4. Deliver on the feature requests as per votes.
  5. Create a separate beta channel - similar to Windows Insider program kind of thing. The experimental toggle is cool too, but that usually ends up breaking things if switched on accidentally.
  6. A better feature tracking and bug tracking tool other than community. (Sadly, don’t have any suggestions for this.)
  7. A voting mechanism on features you guys plan to add so it can be prioritized better based on what devs might actually need.

DISCLAIMER: The above list is based on my limited knowledge of software development and experience with Wappler.

Lastly, a big THANK YOU to team Wappler for thinking, building and maintaining this amazing idea of an open, visual and low-code platform for web development :tada:. Hope this keeps improving and continues to build towards a more capable IDE for web & mobile app development.

Looking at George’s Medium post about Wappler’s year in review, I realised how much was added to Wappler in just a year and how quickly we get accustomed to it and start taking it for granted. Hence decided to write this post.

Happy New Year 2021 Everyone. :partying_face: :slightly_smiling_face:

P.S. It would take about 10 days to re-do the first project that I built on Wappler which 2 years ago took about 2 months to complete. From scratch. And I can deliver a better UX too.

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