Updated Review

  • I have to assume that most of these reviews come from non-technical web hobbyist, or through marketing paid “PR” efforts. I continue to work on a project with this theme for the first time. I come from Elementor and WPBakery pages, not blocks paradigm. There are things to like with blocks and easy of tweak and copying code between pages and sites. But in building a highly customized site I will have to return to Elementor, the product just is not there yet in depth, it seems like dev’s think they are their but I’m telling you in you do a delta against Elementor in functional depth you will find a lot of gaps. Can they be addressed manually, yes if you are handy with css and html they can, but it causes one to loose time in this scenario. I do think however it is far superior for less complicated sites, where a designer is simply collecting content from client, picks a theme, gives them a few revisions and Voila site is done. And it is much lighter and faster than anything built with WPBakery or Elementor, which is clearly because there has been a lot less development done for GP and the blocks product, it is a long way from being more than a good solution for entry level and mid-level sites. The other issue I have had is the lack of good responsive support in the seeded css of the templates, the project has accepted the WordPress projects 3 viewport paradigm which is somewhat nuts, completely ignoring laptop viewport, maybe this is because they believe it is so close the desktop it doesn’t matter, but again Elementor learned this lesson a long time ago and addresses it by default, saving many hours of tweaking pages. I will leave my 4 stars and hope for more. Project should focus on extending responsive support and style control depth, I will use it again but won’t be able to put it in the main stable with the other work horses.

    • This topic was modified 5 months, 3 weeks ago by James Huff.
    • This topic was modified 4 months, 1 week ago by mballew.
    • This topic was modified 4 months, 1 week ago by mballew.
    • This topic was modified 4 months, 1 week ago by mballew.
Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • Theme Author Tom

    (@edge22)

    Hi there,

    Thanks for taking the time to leave a review.

    Our free versions are meant to serve as a solid base for your website. They focus primarily on performance, stability and security. That being said, I think that the free version of GenerateBlocks has a ton of controls that allow you to do a lot of things, especially for a free version.

    Very limited in responsive management, global controls of style properties is very limited, even in premium edition.

    I’m assuming we’re talking about GenerateBlocks here? If so, we just recently released our Global Styles feature in GenerateBlocks Pro. It gives you unlimited responsive management (you can build your own media queries), and almost every style property you can think of. You can check it out here:

    https://generateblocks.com/new-global-styles-pattern-library/
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN7ivne6R9k
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWzzVhESXJc
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yezwCmQNbU4&t=2s

    I can confidently say that the responsive controls are vastly superior to anything else in the market when using this new Global Style engine. You can even build @container queries if you want.

    This style engine we developed will be implemented in the free blocks soon.

    but UI lacks an ability to copy and paste styles between common element types

    This is a feature in GenerateBlocks Pro.

    It seems all these page editors suffer in wordpress from editor view and public view caching issues, always a hassle to get a real view without having to go to private or incognito.

    The plugin itself doesn’t do any caching, so you shouldn’t be seeing any issues caused by GenerateBlocks here. If you are, a bug report would be great so we can check out what’s going on.

    A lot of annoying usability issues but it seems to be a young project so hopefully in time it will mature.

    We’re always working on improving it. If you have any specific suggestions to improve usability, please feel free to open a support topic.

    Thanks again.

    Thread Starter mballew

    (@mballew)

    Thanks for the response, don’t take me wrong, I did see things that are superior to Elementor, especially better organization of UI components. I’d have to compare to the free version of Elementor to know the deltas on responsive management, personally I believe the responsive aspect of a site and especially to a designer is at the top of the list in deciding on which theme’s and builders to use.

    For this reason alone, I would recommend to not make responsive management tools that are Pro or Premium featured freely available. This is how you can garner market share, even though a designer is using your free version now, he will likely have a project where he will require Premium features, don’t make him buy premium to design a good basic site for his or hers client.

    Myself and my developer have had to do more hands-on tweaking than I would think is reasonable for a Premium theme, I don’t believe I should also be required to buy a Premium page builder on top of the theme as the theme is coming from the same financially benefited group. I installed the GB product because it seemed a reasonable thing to do as it was presented, and it has been helpful, but I never had the intent of buying a pro version after paying for a Premium theme license. You may technically have divided the project into two product areas, but the public will still see you as one.

    I had thought about and looked at using Elementor with the GP premium theme but I could see that was not going to work well and they naturally did not play well together and I’m not sure who’s doing that was, my guess is Elementor team as I really have disdain for how they run their project, But they have all the free functionality needed to make a good responsive site and they have a strong 3rd party community extending their products, this is what has gotten them to the top, BUT they are ready to be toppled, and that will only happen with strong support of the designer community and designers many times need free software to build low cost sites, but would be within their reasonable expectation to have the site generate a full set for responsive viewports for desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile, which I don’t see here. So my recommendation is to make responsive generation and tweaking an easy and free experience, this will get you a larger following, yes we can tweak with hand coding but that is time consuming and causes us to loose in the end financially.

    • This reply was modified 5 months, 3 weeks ago by mballew.
    Thread Starter mballew

    (@mballew)

    I have now found a bug in responsive controls for table element. I guess i need to report it to GB team.

    Theme Author Tom

    (@edge22)

    I agree. We’re in the process of bringing our new style engine to our free blocks, so you’ll have the same control over responsive design as you do in our Global Styles feature.

    We’ve also just released GeneratePress One, which packages our premium theme and GenerateBlocks Pro into one product. You can see this at our website: https://generatepress.com

    We’re working towards building an all-in-one system that allows you to build high-performing websites without needing to write any code at all.

    Of course, our free versions will continue to offer a lot of foundational features, while the pro versions bring those features to a new level to allow for full control over designing your website.

    I have now found a bug in responsive controls for table element. I guess i need to report it to GB team.

    Please do ??

    Thanks again for taking the time to share your feedback. It’s appreciated.

    Thread Starter mballew

    (@mballew)

    Thanks, just for this explanation I changed rating; that shows a support of customer and shows the roadmap understands the current state of project and how customers experience the product from a designer point of view, I will follow project and look forward to a unified approach that has customer buying pro blocks and getting full theme features or buying premium theme and getting pro block features, it won’t look good to customers who realize both are under one roof to double dip when they are willing to pay for a premium/pro license. If you can work that out and get deeper in UI controls of style elements and imo extend the responsive controls beyond gutenberg 3 viewport support, you will have a real winner that can draw away from projects like Elementor who are riddled with poor 3rd party partners who play their own games.

    • This reply was modified 5 months, 2 weeks ago by mballew.
    Theme Author Tom

    (@edge22)

    Thanks!

    I definitely suggest taking a look at GP One if you haven’t, and our Global Styles system in GenerateBlocks Pro. I think the responsive controls there are exactly what you’re looking for.

    I’ll be sure to update here once we release GenerateBlocks 2.0, which will bring the same level of control that Global Styles has to our local block styling.

    Appreciate all the feedback ??

    Thanks for the response, don’t take me wrong, I did see things that are superior to Elementor…

    Why do you compare Generatepress with a pagebuilder? While there are themes on the market that include a pagebuilder, it’s not the same. Thank God, Generatepress does not include a builder.

    I really hope that the full site editing crap will always be an OPTION in Generatepress. The more “convenient” editing gets, the more bloated is the theme. I’m sure that Tom and the team will do a great job. But I would prefer a mean and lean version. I absolutly like the option to deactivate premium features that are not needed. Awesome!

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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