Over the few years Wappler has been around, the community often fulls up with people asking about migrating from other low / no code tools to Wappler, this can be anything from WordPress to WebFlow, etc. It also has many people asking about documentation, and updated documentation or more tutorials.
Firstly just to get a few things out the way, the more things you try integrate into Wappler the more difficult everything becomes, and the higher the learning curve, honestly trying to use a front end created in another low/no code application or a template you have to edit to work in Wappler etc. just makes the entire process more difficult.
If you have never been a developer then I would avoid doing that as Wappler is an all in one tool that can do it all, not to say that everything inside Wappler was 100% created by Wappler, their Frameworks are already integrated from the original Twitter Bootstrap into Wappler, so although Wappler gives you easy access to use the framework, they did not actually create Bootstrap, which in essence means you could get yourself all the learning resources you desire for Bootstrap 5 and learn that first, and use Wappler to test what you learn.
The rendering in the design view in Wappler uses the Google Chrome Render engine, so it should in general render in Wappler as it would in Google Chrome as Wappler did not make that either, but integrated it rather.
JavaScript, Full Calendar, Google Captcha, Monaco Code Editor, to mention but a few other modules / languages were also all just integrated by Wappler. So Wappler basically used Apples core idea and bundled a ton of the best open source tools together and created a million of their own too, and integrated it all together in an interface that attempts to make it as easy as possible for most low coder people to be able to use.
The reason Wappler people in this community act like Wappler is the best tool ever imagined is because many of the original users came from a development background, and converted from the amazing DMXZone, which was created by this exact same team 20 years ago, back when ZZ Top was still an awesome band.
This group of developers already had to manually code in languages like PHP, NodeJS, JavaScript, and had to manually connect and learn database structured query language, learn how to design database structures with keys and column types. So when Wappler made a tool that we could create a site in about a tenth the time it used to take, and have hardly any knowledge of all the languages we were using it felt like magic to us.
The good news is Wappler agrees with you about the docs and tutorials and try to get them created as quickly as possible, although it is very tough as it is a rapid developing application and a tutorial created on Wednesday may be out of date by Thursday, in fact I can almost guarantee that, as every Thursday we are blessed by the amazing Wappler team with more toys, bug fixes, and improvements.
The second piece of good news is that, you could use the documentation on Bootstraps own website to learn about the Framework and leverage your new found skills inside Wappler, so if design is your main aim then a good grasp on Bootstrap can get you much further much quicker. You could learn a bit of CSS for styling and use that knowledge directly in Wappler too. I would not go as far as to learn PHP, ASP, JavaScript etc. but maybe researching the core principals of web elements they all share can help you move along quicker, such as a variable, they are used in all programming languages, Arrays, and a few others are all used over many of these languages.
In the end of the day you could learn Wapplers user interface rather, and use your learned knowledge from the other resources which could help you when stuck or just to get going a bit faster, and it’s not wasted learning, if you never decide Wappler is the right tool for you, then knowing some HTML, Bootstrap classes and concepts, CSS is all going to get you further in any of the other tools you may use.
Lastly the reason why many people from a developer background are not as concerned about user interface changes is because we are not looking for a particular button to do something as such, as from our background we already have an idea of what we need, so it’s really just a case of finding it rather than figuring out what we need, the question is where is this or that.
The reason I wrote this is that I have just helped my youngest daughter learn Wappler in 3 weeks and she has already made 3 little dummy websites, and has found it pretty easy, probably because I gave her a an inLearning Bootstrap 5 Essential Training video as her starting point.
Hopefully for any newcomers you may find this information helpful, and be able to use some of my advice to get going easier. Don’t get despondent we all began somewhere, in fact most of us started in a worse off place.
The first time I echoed out Hello World! in PHP I wanted to contact Morpheus and tell him I was ready to accept his pills as I was the greatest computer hacker that ever lived now. In Wappler you could be a non coder and write Hello World! in 4 different programming languages in about 3 seconds.
Also keep in mind, before Wappler you had to learn quite a bit about your own computer too, even just to install half the tools, and a lot about servers, which is almost all done for you in Wappler.
To only have to learn an interface, is 90% of the battle already won.
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