MaxiBlocks

This is a good product that has a lot of great designs. However, as a software engineer who has built tons of WordPress sites (although not my fav thing) I still like WordPress for when many people in a company will edit things. WordPress core team has done a good job in keeping up with the times. In the days of everyone building in express/node NPM - WordPress has stood test of time.

First, if you do not have the recommended setup ie. Maria DB up to the version they recommend, and your server instance is running on a older Ubuntu like I had one running on 16.04 - prepare to have to get a new server instance. First, MariaDB is not as straight forward to upgrade to via server - so you need to understand how to do that and the complications that could be faced.

Your best bet is going to be a new server instance, Cloudways is one of the few that offers this and later versions of MariaDB.

Without this, Maxiblocks is a resource hog and can be a nightmare to edit with. There will be times that css changes just don't occur - this is after hours and hours of maybe working on something. You can try to duplicate it or save the box but then move to a new page - but most likely it will still not work. I had one time where when I switched themes, then switched back the css ie. the css they inject in with their var's started working again but majority of the time it did not, and I was basically creating all my css manually.

Not a good experience and not workable at any sort of scale.

Next, I did upgrade and get the latest Ubuntu and MariaDB on Cloudways. This significantly improved Maxiblocks.

The plus is there are a lot of designs and they are done in a way that can get you a good looking website. I'm from DC but this looks like a Berlin type design / group. The interface is good to use as long as you have the latest and fastest server / correct Maria DB.

However, there are a lot of little kinks. It's open source so technically, I believe you are paying for the "pro" features - not sure if you could just Fork and get it for free.

So, first they use Hello Theme for Elementor which they call their MaxiBlock 100% width theme.. But it's just a modified HelloTheme and you will get asked to install Elementor but you don't have to..

They have very bad documentation. Almost comical in how low detail it is.

If you want to create a header for your complete site, you will most likely have to create the header on each page - and footer as well. The work around is using a theme other than Hello Theme that allows FSE and then Maxiblocks will create a header and footer.

They say there is a Maxiblock theme coming out soon so hopefully that helps with the situation.

Next, lets talk about pages that need a structure ie. singlular blog, 404 pages, or any custom post types. There is a way to query ACF fields but without FSE, you will be creating every blog again and again. They have something called 'Style Cards' - but there documentation is so low on that, I don't even get it. I think it's main purpose is to control the simplistic format of a header, paragraph, graphic, font etc so that you don't have to use the default and keep changing things.

Once again, extremely hard to figure out & could have been easy. As I was trying to figure out why my pages would inherit things like Roboto and certain colors and could not figure out where defaults are set.

The blog system they use ie. the system they use to show queryable content lacks features and doesn't always work. I've had times when 'Accumlator' - another feature that has very little to no explanation didn't work. Now, what if you want to have a 'Also check out' type blog query after your blog post. How can you make sure that the current blog post does not show up in the query? Can you use Accumulator for that? I think you might be able to do that but then youd have to repeat this for each blog post. From what I've seen, its basically just using the # of the blog post from the filter you set. So if you are setting up a design with 1 featured blog post on the left, and then have the other blog posts on the right, you would set accumulator to 2. On a normal blog situation, you are not going to count this so it needs to be done via code to skip the post that is currently featured. Possible potential to use CSS but again, this is not a pretty solution.

As of right now, this is good for landing pages. They have no form functionality - you will still need Gravity Forms. I believe they just fixed their video functionality to pop up a modal, but that wasn't working prior. The numbers for scroll effect run funky. They dont allow decimals and arent as smooth as others I have used.

When you are editing Text and say you change a certain color or font to some parts of that text block, it can change the variables each time there is a change, thus if you had something going on in css ie ::after or ::before - you would have to be aware of that and change accordingly.

It has a lot of work to do to really become something that is ready for a production website that is bringing in a lot of traffic. I would not use this for that. Since I moved to Cloudways, the problems have lowered a lot meaning it looks like there are no issues with saving but there is still too much uncertainty.

I haven't even dabbled in their interaction design, looking at it, just makes me want to use my own JS or JS library. But since I'm on a server and Maria DB that doesn't take forever to load, I guess i'll give it a go.

Again, if you are using this as a landing page - great solution as long as you have your own form system.

If you are using this for some site inspiration - it has some okay designs - better than most block plugins i've seen.

If you are using this to develop a full website that is for a non-small business client - then you will need to be careful. First, you will need to use a FSE theme. Next, you will need to be aware of the quirks and figure out if the staff that will be editing it will find it intuitive or not. You will most likely have to create your own react blocks for many things, or use another library as well. Of course, you can use the built in blocks and then stylize and edit the code to customize.

Maxiblocks does allow you to grab the code so I technically think you would be able to just grab the blocks you want and customize it but I actually am not sure - may have to go to their open source project and do that. You can save the block but not sure if you can edit the functionality & the css is all inherited.

There are also other annoying things like the copy styles. I remember having to do this numerous times because there was no duplicate. Well the way to do it, is you have to open up the document overview, find the text element then you can duplicate it - again, nothing that I found in the documentation (or maybe I just didn't look hard enough).

I'm giving a honest review, as I believe in not being biased. I believe that is where Appsumo shines, not when someone is incentivized or trying to bring traffic to their Youtube review.

I do believe this project has legs and will continue. It is a buy for me just for the designs. With their own theme, this could change to a must buy.