WDD LIVE 016 – Breakdance Builder First Impressions!

0:00:00
Yo, what’s up everybody? It is go time. Man I got to tell you, I missed everybody last week. I was itching man. I was down in Florida. I was at the beach and I was like you know what, I’m really missing the live stream. I wanted to be on live. All right we already got a great fantastic showing people are pouring in Let’s let’s go to the chat. Make sure you say hi when you arrive we’ve got Tony saying let’s see those moves. I think that is a joke referring to breakdance All right, we got Arthur, we’ve got David, we’ve got Luke, Ruben is here.

0:00:53
Good to see you, Ruben. I know Ruben is a breakdancer. He is a breakdancer. We’ve got Luke, Joanna, Andrew, Tommy, Derek, Ninja is here. Luke, got a lot of people. Mateo is in the house, Alessio, this is fantastic. I love it, I love it, I love it. I don’t know how many people are here yet. Okay, all right, we’re already at 74. And I don’t even think YouTube has sent out the notifications yet.

0:01:20
I am ready to rock and roll. We’re not gonna go right into breakdance. I wanna give people a little bit more time to get in here, but we are gonna get to it like almost immediately. But I do want to cover a couple different things. Well, one, I wanted to give you guys a sneak peek of something. Wanted to give you a sneak peek. And by the way, I might be a little slow today I have let me see my my bar keeps switching screens. I switch my monitors I’ve had a problem with this being in the way sometimes when I’m looking at this monitor over here I didn’t want that to happen so I’m making this other one my main monitor for this for these lives and You know things may open on the wrong side and then I have to move it and stuff like that. So just bear with me.

0:02:02
But I want to show you guys a sneak peek. So I am going to share the screen real quick. I wanted to show you one really, so it’s a development we’ve been talking about for a while now in terms of automatic CSS. And I just actually got off a 90-minute meeting call with Mateo. And we were talking about, man, some of the stuff we talked about, you guys don’t even know what is Potentially coming very very exciting stuff, but let me open up. Let’s see which one it would be it would be The generate branch okay, let’s just open this or see it open in the wrong screen all right We need to move this over here, and we need to get this over here. Okay there. We go all right All right, we’re gonna go to pages.

0:02:49
Where are we gonna go? Let’s go to add new page and let’s go to, I don’t know, let’s just say grid or something like that. I don’t even know why. This might end up being a total fail, I don’t know. We’ll see, I don’t know why this is happening. Oh, it’s, you know why? I think I know why. Let’s go to appearance themes and let’s get that generate press theme active again.

0:03:15
Okay. This will be exciting. Any generate press users in the house? This actually just, it is a Gutenberg thing, but it’s also just happens to be a generate thing as well. But are there any generate users in the house? Let’s see. Let’s go to, let’s see if that our pages is fixed now. All right. So we’re going to go add new page. Yeah, that’s better. I don’t know what this red box is, but y’all can ignore that.

0:03:42
Let’s just do grid. Okay. So, I know I don’t want to restore backups. Oh, okay. Now the red box is gone. Fantastic. Oh, no, it’s back. All right. So we are going to add a container. This is a container from generate.

0:03:57
Okay. What’s up, Michelle? No visible app doc. Woo hoo. Okay, good. Yeah, Derek, Derek has been on to me about this app doc, man, if if Derek sees this app doc, he has like a conniption fit. Well, I don’t know what what is it about the app doc, man, it’s just you don’t have to look at it. Let’s ignore it. Let’s ignore it. Okay, so I’m going to add a container here. This is the new version of generate, which means it does not have needless inner wrappers, which is fantastic.

0:04:26
Okay, so then we are going to add three containers inside. Oh, oh dear. Okay, man, I just, I still really hate the workflow. Remove container. Okay, let’s duplicate and let’s duplicate. And then let’s add a paragraph inside here, just something very simple. So let’s say one, and then I’m just gonna copy that. Let’s paste it, paste it. This can say two, this can say three. Okay moment of truth Let’s grab this container. Let’s slide down here to advanced and Let’s go to additional classes and try grid 3. Oh my gosh gap M let’s maybe grab one of those containers and Let’s try pad M. Let’s try maybe BG base. Oh my gosh. Let’s try text white. Oh god Automatic CSS working in Gutenberg. What is this?

0:05:19
Automatic CSS working with generate out of the box Okay, we’ve got we’ve got some progress. I’m not saying that this is like You know a hundred percent right now But this is very promising is it not I think it’s very promising A lot of stuff. I mean, let’s go with, how about, we’ll just, let’s delete this. Let’s do one more thing. Let’s try one more thing. Remove container. How about we add a container here?

0:05:49
Now I will tell you guys, look, I have not, I have not done any work to make automatic CSS work in GeneratePress. And I’m gonna tell you, it will not work in Gutenberg 100%, because Gutenberg does not structure their HTML properly and you guys know I harp on this all the time all the time and here’s why guys I did I’ve done nothing with generate press right all I’ve done is look at it I haven’t I haven’t done anything to automatic CSS to make it work in generate why does it work in generate this is a nod to generate because as of this new update where they don’t put nonsense inter-wrappers like all these other builders like to do inside of the container, ACSS is designed to work with structurally correct HTML.

0:06:37
So if a builder produces structurally correct HTML, I don’t have to do any extra work to make it work. It just works. It works out of the box. So any builder that just does things the way that they’re supposed to do them with HTML, automatic CSS is gonna work. It’s gonna work out of the box. And so that’s why you see this working right now in generate.

0:06:56
I haven’t done anything. All right, all we did, we had to make it, we had to make the Gutenberg environment load the styles correctly, which is a nightmare and a headache in itself. But now that that’s done, this is what you’re seeing. So Sylvia says, is it going to work with cadence too? And that’s up to cadence, right? cadence 2 and That’s up to cadence right ultimately it’s up to cadence and I’ll say no out of the box. It’s not going to work I looked at cadence yesterday. I took just a quick peek at it and they do the divception thing There’s a lot of nonsense inter rappers nonsense HTML going on and that is very very very problematic for just clean CSS so Yeah, it’s a this is very promising, okay?

0:07:41
All right. Let’s see. So, that means we can install ACSS for Bricks and use it as well for Gutenberg and Posts, or would it be a separate product installation? That is a fantastic question, and the answer is because of the way that automatic CSS is built. There are no add-on plugins. There are no separate plugins. There is just automatic CSS. You install it, as soon as this is baked into the actual version, as soon as you install ACSS, yes, you can use ACSS and Bricks and Gutenberg simultaneously with no additional plugins, no additional anything.

0:08:17
All right, so it is a very, very, very promising development here. Just wanted to give you a little sneak peek. That’s all, hope you like it. Okay, let’s see how many people we have. Oh God, we’re over 150. It’s time, it’s time to get into breakdance land. Let me explain real quick what we’re doing. Sorry, okay, let me say one thing. Two weeks ago, we did the live, right?

0:08:44
I did a two and a half hour live stream with you guys. Two hours after that live stream, I was diagnosed with strep so I I crushed that live stream having strep throat and And then I proceeded for the next week to just it was it kind of sucked and it was half of it was on my vacation Which also kind of sucked, but it was fine. We made through it But yes, I’m still dealing with the residuals from this like congestion and stuff like that So if I I’m sorry, I hate the clearing the throat sound and all of that, but I may have to do it at some point. Okay, let’s get rid of this.

0:09:21
Let’s set the stage, okay, let’s set the stage. First of all, what you need to know if you’re new here, this is web design for Domies Live. Domies, it’s not dummies, it’s Domies. Domies is because we respect the DOM. We like to inspect and respect the DOM, and we just, we really like clean HTML we really like clean CSS we like well-developed websites we like page builders that respect the DOM and you know we’re all about scalability and maintainability in web design and best practices and accessibility all the stuff that really matters all the stuff that professionals care about and the beginners often don’t really know about and that a lot of people who consider themselves to be professionals but really you look under the hood and it’s kind of a horror show, right?

0:10:10
It’s a little bit of a horror show on the sites that they are creating. If you are a beginner and you want to become more of a professional, I just launched a brand new course, Page Building 101, it’s 100% free. I’m not selling you anything right here. It’s 100% free, Page Building 101. You can go to pagebuilding101.com and be an official member just by, you know, getting on the email list basically.

0:10:32
But there’s also a playlist right here on this channel called PageBuilding101. You don’t even have to get on the email list if you don’t want to. You can just go right to the playlist and you can start watching PageBuilding101. And we’re having a lot of fun with it. It is, it’s fantastic, okay? Is anybody doing PageBuilding101 in the chat? Drop comments below.

0:10:49
Let me know what you think of the course so far. Let everybody else know what you think of the course so far. I’ve been getting great feedback on it. I think everybody is very, very positive. And it is, I will tell you right now, Page Building 101 is going to elevate you, okay? If you complete the course, it’s not done yet, I’m building it as we go. If you complete this course, you are gonna know more than 95% of people who use Page Builders.

0:11:15
Like, that’s a given. You’re gonna be way elevated, way above 95% of the people who use page builders to build websites. Just with that one course. So that’s fantastic. And I also feel like this course is going to launch a lot of careers. Like this is gonna change a lot of people’s lives. It’s gonna allow people to completely shift over into web design if they want to, and shift into web design in the right way, doing things the right way, not building these horror show websites.

0:11:43
Okay? All right, so that’s that announcement. Next, let’s talk about breakdance. Okay? Just setting the stage. Breakdance, if you don’t know, and I have to address this, I have to address this up front, because nothing else that I say in this live stream will matter or be taken seriously or anything else if I don’t address this at the very beginning. Breakdance is a controversial builder.

0:12:10
Breakdance is created by the founder of Oxygen and he has a team and they build breakdance and but he leads the team. Breakdance came out of nowhere, effectively. Nobody really knew that it was coming. Oxygen’s community thought that Oxygen was going to be rewritten in Vue or something similar. And I think that’s what a lot of people in the Oxygen community were hoping for. And it was something that I felt was probably necessary for Oxygen to really continue to lead the charge.

0:12:52
Oxygen was leading the charge in the page building world. There was not really a page builder that was allowing people to do what oxygen was allowing you to do and producing the kind of output that oxygen produces. It’s a fantastic builder. I still think it’s a fantastic builder. But it turns out that we were hit with an announcement that, oh, oxygen is not being rewritten. In fact, we’re not doing much with it.

0:13:20
We’re just kind of doing the standard updates kind of thing. What we’ve actually been working on for years, nobody knows really how long, is Breakdance. They released this new thing and it’s a whole new product. And if you want to switch, you can switch. But it’s really not for oxygen people. It’s really more to compete with Elementor, we were told. And we were also told some other things. So where the controversy comes from is not necessarily the launch of Breakdance, it’s how Breakdance was launched. There was an infamous live stream, which I’m not going to tell you where to get it.

0:13:56
If you already know where it is, then you already know about it. But I’m not going to rehash all of this stuff. I’m not going to point people to it, but there was an infamous live stream with the founder and some things were said that were very troublesome in my estimation and it was not a good look and you know for that reason it’s you know something that, let’s just say this, we’re about to at breakdance. I am not a petty person. Regardless of what I think about the founder, I am able to pull up breakdance and look at it as if I don’t know anything about that. I’m going to look at breakdance the same way I looked at quickly, the same way I looked at bricks, the same way I look at every page builder that I open. That’s how I’m going to look at breakdance.

0:14:46
Ok, so you know, a lot of you know how I feel about the founder, none of that matters to me in this situation. And my job in analyzing these builders, this is not by the way what we do here on Web Design for Domies most of the time. Most of the time we’re doing reviews, in-depth critiques of websites so that we can learn better UX, better UI, better copywriting, better SEO, better all these things.

0:15:14
Everything that makes a website successful, that’s what we talk about on Web Design for Dummies so that everybody can learn and grow and yada, yada, yada, right? But we’ve also started to take a look at these page builders because, I mean, we’re building the sites with page builders. It makes sense that we should dissect these and see which page builders are really, really legit and which ones are not so legit. And that’s kind of where this idea came from of doing first impressions of builders and things like that.

0:15:39
So I want everybody to know that, you know probably how I feel on the back end in terms of like leadership, right? But what you really need to know is that when I look at a builder like this on a live, none of that matters to me. I am 100% able to set all of that aside and look at the builder the same way I look. So I’m not coming in here to throw anybody under the bus or throw this builder under the bus or any other you know petty nonsense that’s that’s not what this is about it’s not what we’re doing here ok the biggest thing that troubles me about breakdance is actually the future of oxygen this this has been my one of my main arguments is that I want to I don’t want to rehash all of this, okay?

0:16:28
And if you’re in the inner circle, I mean, I wrote a very long article when it first happened about what I thought was going to happen and some problems. Some of the other problematic things that were said were really regard to what Breakdance was going to be and how it was going to work. For example, we’re never going to have a repeater or a query loop or a query builder for example. We’re never gonna have a this, we’re never gonna have a that. Why are we never gonna have those things? Well, because oxygen has those things and if you want to use things in that fashion, if that’s how you wanna build websites, use oxygen.

0:17:05
Don’t use breakdance. This was kind of what we were told. But slowly over time, all of the we’re not going to have, we’re not going to have is now kind of there. Okay. And so people are like, Oh, bricks is bricks going to kill oxygen. No, I don’t think bricks is going to kill oxygen. I don’t think bricks ever was going to kill oxygen. What would kill oxygen is break dance. Break dance is the biggest threat to oxygen. In my opinion. Why is it the biggest threat to oxygen? Because it’s cannibalizing oxygen’s features. The features that Breakdance was never going to have initially is now getting those features. And at some point, it’s not far from the point where people just say, why am I just not using Breakdance? It’s built on a more modern framework. It’s got more modern features that they’re not bringing to oxygen, but they’re bringing to break. So you see, you see that’s where the threat comes from in my estimation.

0:18:04
So that’s kind of how I feel about that. Okay, so controversial builder, we’re taking an unbiased look at it. I am worried about the cannibalization. I think that’s everything that I wanted to say before we dive in and get started, all right? I’m gonna go through the chat real quick and then we’re gonna pull this up and get right in. All right, Elijah’s here, welcome Elijah. We have, let’s see, man, we’ve got, this is fantastic, okay.

0:18:38
Everybody’s kind of in agreement here. Okay, a lot of PB101 is fantastic. Why can I not buy an ACSS LTD? I mean, that’s been talked about many, many, many, many times. Okay, I think we’re all on the same page. If you have a question, please, please, please write question in all caps and then ask your question. Otherwise, it’s absolutely going to get buried. I really like to answer questions, but if I can’t find them, I can’t answer them.

0:19:10
So question in all caps before you ask a question. All right, so I’m gonna pull this up. We’re going to do a new site, create new site. Here we go. This is gonna be called Breakdance, and we’re going to continue, continue. I don’t really care. Okay, add site. All right. Can you elaborate why Breakdance is not a threat to BRICS?

0:19:33
Breakdance is not a threat to BRICS because of the general philosophy of Breakdance, which we will talk about in just a second. And you guys know I have a page builder audit checklist, the way that I basically audit page builders based on very specific factors. And Lewis wants to kill oxygen. I wouldn’t go that far. I wouldn’t go that far. But some of the troublesome things that were said were somewhat of an insult to the oxygen community. And that’s kind of, that’s worrisome.

0:20:04
Okay, so here we go. Breakdance WP admin, we are live. Let’s get it up here. Okay, no, we don’t wanna do that. We don’t wanna be logging in. All right, we need a one-click admin access. Thank you, thank you. Can we trust this? We put this in. Thank you. Can we trust this?

0:20:21
We put this in okay, of course always all right WP admin. We can still use it anyway No problems. All right, so I have this audit checklist that I’m going to be going down I don’t make the audit checklist public, but I did do a video on the things that I look for it’s called 20 Features that a legit page builder must have it’s on this channel You can go watch it if you want to kind of see the things that I look at and think about. It’s kind of a very popular video. But let’s go ahead and get started. One of those things is how easy is it? And the reason I don’t already have this, people are like, oh, you could save a bunch of time by having this already set up and ready to go.

0:21:05
Well, guess what? The first thing that I look at is how easy is it to set up the page builder? So I don’t want to pre-set it up for everybody and skip that part. I want to see how easy is it to install a page builder and get started building sites. And let’s look at the setup process. This is part of the analysis. This is part of the audit, so to speak, okay? All right, so I’m going to upload a plugin here. We’re going to go to downloads, breakdown, spam, install.

0:21:32
I don’t think I need a license key. Hopefully I’m going to have one, but I don’t want to go dig it up. But all right, disable theme or keep themes. This is very much like Oxygen. Like Oxygen didn’t have this option. It disables it by default, but it’s good that you can continue to do that. All right, let’s finish setup. All right, so we have templates.

0:21:52
I’m just gonna kind of do an overview of what I see is available to us so far. So we have templates that we can add. So there’s a single post blog, there’s a post archive, there’s a 404 not found, search results. You can add a custom template, which I imagine is for custom post types. So that looks good. There’s a headers area. There’s a footers area.

0:22:13
I’m wondering about the assignment of headers, location everywhere also. Okay, so there is conditional logic in terms of where your header is assigned. That’s good to see. We have global blocks. I assume those work very similar to how they work in oxygen Pop-ups, okay. All right. Looks like there must be a form element in here because there’s form submissions There’s a design library Which is good to see bricks has one of these as well, which is kind of integral to how we’ve incorporated frames And then we have settings. Let’s go through these settings here Global styles, we can edit global styles.

0:22:49
We’ll take a look at that in just a second. Theme, disable theme, keep theme, already saw that. WooCommerce, I don’t care about. User access, all right, don’t care right now. Maintenance mode, don’t care about any of that right now. Performance, okay, Gutenberg blocks CSS. All right, a lot of this stuff is very similar to Perfmatters, like what Perfmatters would allow you to do. But it’s good that some of this is built in.

0:23:22
I mean, most people, like you guys have seen my plugin stack, right? Perfmatters gets installed on every single website, so these settings being in a builder, I guess is good for some people. If you have like a Perfmatters style stack where you already know you wanna optimize all of these things, it is available in that. But it is good that you can do this natively.

0:23:40
Alright there’s an API for various things good good good okay post types fantastic advanced okay privacy design library alright I think we’re I think we’re ready to rock and roll you can put some header and footer code in tools I want to make sure there weren’t any like elements you had to enable or disable or anything like that. All right. Well, let’s rock and roll then. So let’s go to a page. Let’s trash the sample page, trash this privacy policy, and let’s start on our homepage. Publish, publish.

0:24:16
Okay. We’re going to edit this in breakdance. So let’s grade, grade the setup process. Oh, I guess we should go back one step. Let’s go Okay back to WordPress I want to look at those global styles, let’s see what’s going on with global styles Settings global styles launch breakdance. Okay. Here we are colors Okay, you can set brand colors text headings links background colors. This is interesting. I don’t know. Oh, that’s the background of the main site. Okay buttons primary and secondary buttons Okay, typography heading fonts, let’s get something else in here DM sands. All right Base size now I saw somewhere where I Bet this works too Good, you can use variables. Okay. I saw somewhere where there was maybe mins and maxes Okay, it looks like there’s a ratio here Okay Advanced body headings links typography body font size I don’t know wasn’t there isn’t there a min max thing that I saw?

0:25:38
I saw like, cause it can not create clamps or fluid responsive typography. I thought I saw that somewhere in like one of the announcements. Anybody know about that? Anybody know? Anybody know? It’s good that you can set a ratio. We don’t need to worry about form styles. Ah, here we go.

0:25:57
Okay, container styles. So I want my container width to be 1366. Ah, that’s better. Okay. Vertical padding and horizontal padding inside of my sections. All right, well, let’s go with, I typically like these to be clamps with a variable, but we’ll just do Ms for now. All right, so let’s go eight and eight.

0:26:20
Okay. Actually, let’s do, let’s do, yeah, that’s fine, whatever. All right. And then there’s a column gap in containers. Let’s think about that for a second. Column gap in containers. Not sure what that would be for. I could see a row gap in container. Well, oh, in the container.

0:26:41
Okay, this is for, all right. This is not sections, this is containers. We’re gonna have to take a look at the section structure in just a second. I’m just gonna save this for now. And all right, this is all good. Not, I mean, not too dissimilar from like Oxygen’s global settings area, right? Okay, let’s get out of here. Let’s skedaddle.

0:27:03
All right, we’re back on the homepage. Let’s go ahead and refresh. Now what we’re gonna take a look at is our elements. What available elements do we have? Because on my audit checklist, it says, very in bold, it says, do they offer the four most important blocks? And I will tell you guys right now, and you’ve seen this in BRICS when I’ve gone over this, you’ve seen this in Elementor when I’ve gone over this. Kevin Gary says, you might have to move your camera circle a little. Oh, hold on one second.

0:27:31
Oh, yeah, because it’s down the bottom. Oh, you couldn’t see that like right hand settings panel for a second, all right. Yeah, I just, I can’t, it’s very, I’ll try to remember that it blocks that area down there and move stuff around, but it’s hard for me to move my actual head. And I’m sorry, my head is, it’s like, it’s big. All right, so all like, the thing with breakdance, let’s talk about philosophy of breakdance.

0:27:58
And somebody asked, I wanna answer the question from earlier, why is Breakdance not a threat to BRICS? So there is a fundamental philosophy and it’s kind of a camp that you need to live in. You need to decide what camp are you going to live in. Are you going to live in the class first workflow camp? Or are you going to live in the, I guess we could call it the copy-paste camp. Do you want to use classes to define styling of global elements, reusable elements, elements that are used more than once effectively, right?

0:28:37
You can go watch my video on BIM, you can go watch my video on utility classes versus custom classes. You could like, every video I demonstrate the same best practices of a class first workflow And by the way a class first workflow is the standard workflow of building websites It just you HTML and CSS or what are used to build websites, okay? And nobody that’s building websites by hand Styles everything at the ID level not a single soul that knows what they’re doing styles everything at the ID level It just doesn’t happen because it’s a bad practice.

0:29:12
That’s objective. That’s not, that’s not, oh, Kevin thinks this. Oh, Kevin has this opinion. It’s not, it’s not, it’s just an accepted fact, okay? What do they use? They use classes. People who build websites use a class-first workflow. This is CSS and HTML. This is your option. Page builders came along.

0:29:30
Page builders came along and, you know, tried to say, well, I guess the theory, I don’t know exactly what they said, I guess the theory was, people who don’t know HTML and CSS aren’t smart enough, or I don’t know, it’s too hard for them to know what a class is. I personally don’t think that, I don’t think that people are that dumb, okay? I think it’s a fairly easy concept to pick up when you’ve been shown it the right way.

0:30:00
So, but page builders came to a different conclusion, and they were like, I don’t know, we don’t think people can handle this classes thing. So what we’re gonna do is just let people style everything at the ID level and then if somebody needs to take these styles and get them over there, they can just copy them and then they can paste them. Or they can just duplicate that block. Which, guys, if you’re building a landing page, it’s not that big of a deal, I guess.

0:30:25
One page? Because if I have eight feature cards and one is styled one way and I need all of them to have that style I can copy design of a feature card and it’s used on all 50 pages copy pasting working anymore Jack ok that’s not how it works you can’t copy paste page by page by page by page this is insanity this is insanity so then they were like you’re right it’s insanity you know like you you build in Divi for a while you got a 30 page site in Divi you hate your life you hate your life when you building it the first time is not a problem and here’s where we have to get into another philosophical point where people say, I love this page builder so fast, I can build pages so fast. And I’m like, but you built it wrong. It’s Yeah, obviously, if you cut corners, you can do something faster. But when I take my car to the shop, and he’s like, Oh, I fix that oil leak in five minutes with duct tape. I’m like, but it’s wrong. He’s like, but it’s not leaking. Like, but it’s wrong, right?

0:31:39
You did it wrong. I want you to do it right, even if it takes you an hour. I want you to do it right. So there’s no mechanic that’s like, oh, use the duct tape process. You get the leaks done in five minutes. Nobody would accept that. But for some reason we accepted in web design of like, oh, let’s race. Let’s all see how fast we can build a page.

0:31:58
And yeah, if you style everything at the ID level, first go through, you’re probably gonna do it faster, but the minute the client comes and says we got to change some things Now you realize the horror show that you have created Where you have a feature card on 40 different pages, and you have no global control over its style. That’s when you realize Oh saving time up front Doesn’t necessarily save me time at any other point in the existence of this website. Okay, so it’s a big, big, big problem. How did page builders that don’t offer a class first workflow address this problem? They addressed it by coming up with the concept of presets.

0:32:40
Divi has presets because they recognized, ah, it’s not a great workflow to not be able to, you know, give people global control over things. But still they said, we think people are too dumb to understand classes. So we’re gonna create a whole new workflow, a whole new concept called presets. And that’s what we’re gonna kind of give people, right? And so if you want, I’m not gonna go into detail on this. You know why? Because I already did.

0:33:06
So you go to this article right here. Page builder global presets are weak, limited and unnecessary. And if you want, it goes into detail, detail, detail, example after example, reason after reason. You can go read this all for yourself if you wanna understand why presets and classes are not the same thing, where presets are a brand new workflow that is an extremely limited workflow and does not give you any help outside of the realm of builders that use presets.

0:33:43
You’re not learning web design at this point. When you use a preset based workflow, you’re not using the language of web design, you’re using the language of page builders. And that doesn’t help you, okay? I’ve always advocated people should learn the language of web design, not learn the language of page builders. Somebody said, and I saw this in the Oxygen community yesterday, there was a comment, and I read it and I was like, I just, I facepalm, right?

0:34:09
They said, I haven’t tried Bricks yet because I don’t want to learn a new builder. You don’t have, when you know the language of web design and two builders leverage the language of web design, there really is no learning a new builder. You only have to learn a new builder when the builder does things in a completely different way than everybody knows and is used to. Like Divi, like Elementor. They don’t give you a div, they don’t give you a section, they create columns, they do this, they do that.

0:34:46
It’s like they created their whole new language for building websites. That’s a builder you have to learn how to use if you know the language of web design you can pick up any builder that does things correctly and you can just use it yeah things are in a different place and whatever right we talked about this before but that’s not a big deal right if your brain can process a little bit of change then you’re going to be just fine but it’s not like flex in bricks is different from flex and oxygen grid in bricks is not different from grid and oxygen they have a different interface but it’s CSS grid if you know CSS grid you can use either builder if you know flex you can use either builder it took me 10 minutes to transition from oxygen to bricks all I had to do is figure out where the things are in a different location and then I was off to the races I didn’t have to learn a new builder now why am I saying this because I’m trying to empower people like you if you’re watching and you’re one of those people that’s like, I don’t want to learn a new builder, I’ll never be able to leave this builder because this is the only builder I can use.

0:35:47
That’s a disempowering position to be in. The empowering position is, I know the language of web design. Therefore, if I pick up a builder that does things correctly, I can use it like that. I don’t have to learn the new builder that’s very very very empowering ok and that’s what I think professionals should be able to do and I’m not talking to the mom that wants to put a you know a website together for her bunco club that’s not what I’m talking about I’m talking about people who want to do this work for other people in charge money that’s the people that I’m talking to ok so back to why is breakdance not a threat to BRICS in my estimation?

0:36:29
Because they chose, Breakdance has chosen to not use a class first workflow. And we’re gonna get into the builder and all of this, but philosophically it’s not a builder that I would use because right here on my list, like one of the top things is, is a class based workflow possible? Now I’ll tell you, I already know in Breakdance, a class-based workflow is possible. But a class-based workflow is not a class-first workflow.

0:37:00
And a class-first workflow is what I look for. What is the difference? Well, it says right here, is a class-based workflow efficient? Is it front and center? It has to be front and center to be efficient, to use a class-based workflow. And no, they’ve hidden it, right? It’s hidden away. And so it makes everything inefficient if that’s the workflow you want to use.

0:37:22
The only efficient workflow is the copy-paste workflow, which is not a true web design workflow. It is a new workflow introduced by page builders specifically, certain page builders. Oxygen is a class-first workflow. Bricks is a class first workflow. These align with the workflow of web design, of the history of web design, okay? All right, so just to make sure that that is clear, the philosophies are completely different.

0:37:54
And I explain this in Page Building 101, and that’s the reason I created Page Building 101. It’s not Bricks 101, it’s not Oxygen 101, it’s not Webflow 101. It’s Pagebuilding 101. It empowers you to know the language of web design and page builders. Alright? And I showed, I opened different page builders and I said, look at Elementor, look at Bricks, right next to each other. Visually, they look very, very similar.

0:38:22
Their philosophy can’t be any more different. What they produce under the hood can’t be any more different. And people will say, you hear anybody say this, immediately you know they have no idea what they’re talking about. Oh, Elementor and Brix are the same thing, you can use whichever one you want. No, no, they can’t be more different, philosophically or in output. They are completely different builders. Look at Oxygen and Elementor. They look different and they are very different. They are very, very different. It doesn’t matter how an interface looks. This interface is similar to this interface.

0:38:59
That doesn’t matter whatsoever. You have to look way beyond that, way beyond that to understand what’s going on with these builders. All right. So let’s go and let’s get into this. So I’m going to look at the first four, what are the four most important blocks? Number one is a div. The div is the fundamental block of web design. And I believe that it was one of the things that we were told.

0:39:27
I’m not 100% on this, don’t, you know. I believe we were told that Breakdance was not gonna get a div. But I see it sitting right here. Now the question is, you know, when I add a div to the page, okay, it automatically put it in a section. So that’s kind of, that’s a little bit irritating, right off the bat. So look, if I should be able to do whatever I want to do, just give me a canvas, I do the things that I want to do.

0:39:53
I’m a professional. If I want to put a div on the page without a section, I should be able to do that, I feel. But look, I don’t know, I don’t know what happened here. It does not allow me to do that. So I have to have a section in order to have a div. All right, so what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna put something in this section like a heading. And we’re just gonna inspect this. So I’m in a div.

0:40:14
All right, so we’re gonna save and we are going to go to the front end. All right, we are going to inspect this. And so the reason I’m inspecting this right now, and you want me to throw somebody under the bus, I’ll throw Gutenberg under the bus. I have no problem throwing Gutenberg under the bus. You guys know that. Gutenberg is an absolute trash can. And if I’m trying to find common ground with Lewis, Lewis is the founder of Breakdance. If I’m trying to find common ground with Lewis, Lewis also feels that Gutenberg is a trash can. Me and Lewis are on the same page with regard to Gutenberg. We both equally think that Gutenberg is an absolute trash can.

0:40:53
Okay, so here’s what I’m looking for. There’s your section, there is an inner container, there is my div, and it is a clean div. That’s what I’m looking for. That is a clean div, meaning it does not have any bogus inner wrappers. You add something like this in Elementor, you get three elements. You add something like this in Gutenberg you get two elements you get I don’t want two elements didn’t ask for two elements a div is a single element I add a div to the page I expect to see a div in the code that’s it I don’t want to see all your other nonsense and all your other trash that you decided to put in there I want to see what I asked for I asked for a div I got a div this is a this is a plus this is a good thing okay all right so now we have our heading we’ve identified our div.

0:41:38
Now what I’m concerned about is this section that I am looking at right here. And somebody says you can just click, you don’t have to drag. All right, probably correct. Okay, all right. So let’s go ahead and delete this now and just add a section. And this is another concerning thing. I’ve already seen it, okay, in the DOM.

0:42:00
I already know what’s going to happen. So in the builder, I have one element. Now this is oxygen in my estimation made this same mistake. And I’m surprised that it isn’t fixed in breakdance. It is an easy fix by the way. If they wanted to fix, I believe they can fix this anytime that they want to. And I would encourage them to fix this. It is a bigger deal than most people realize. And I’ll tell you why in just a second. I’ve explained it on other streams in the past.

0:42:31
So a section is a dual element container, a dual element box, right? Or should be. Now Webflow, you add a section, it only adds one element. And it doesn’t even give you a section tag. It doesn’t even really make any sense. Oxygen does this semi-correctly. It looks like Breakdance does this semi-correctly, but Bricks does this 100% correct. So there are examples of page builders that do these things correct.

0:42:57
So the things that I’m asking for, it’s not like they’re unachievable or difficult or anything like that. You see one element here, but a section is a dual element thing. So I’m gonna add a heading to this and it’s gonna say hero, okay? And we’re gonna go inspect this on the front end. And so what I’m looking for, if you see the hero is not touching the edge of the screen over here, that’s because there is an inner container right here that is the width of your website.

0:43:24
And when we inspect this, we will see it. So there is the section right there. There is, which has a semantic section tag, so that’s good. Fantastic. Then you have your inner container. This is what creates the page width and oh gosh hold on okay so we’re seeing yet another this is a little bit disappointing because this is the same issue that oxygen has it’s hundred-percent fixable though if they want to fix it they can fix it okay you see the padding for the sections is applied to the container in the section. And that, I think I’ve objectively proven via articles, via other videos, that this is not the way to apply padding.

0:44:11
The padding should be applied to the section itself. What is the main reason you should apply it to the section and not the container? Because the container is setting your website’s width. And when you add padding inside the container, you are effectively changing the width of your website and that is an undesirable outcome. If you add the padding to the section wrapper, it does not affect the width of your website. And so you get the width that you asked for, right?

0:44:39
And then down the line, there are other things that you have to account for. Like if you wanna create a variable for your website width, you can’t create a variable for your website width because your website width isn’t actually your website width. You have to create a variable that now does a calculation of your section padding plus the width, okay? Or I guess it would be minus the width. And that’s gonna get you to your real website width value. It creates a lot of just nonsense that does not need to happen.

0:45:05
So objectively, the padding should go in the section and not the container. And these are big deals. These are not small issues. When you are building a website and you know what should be happening and that thing is not happening, and then you gotta do all this diagnosis of why and you gotta do all these workarounds, it’s a pain in the ass. And for no reason, no benefit and no reason, right?

0:45:26
It’s just, in my estimation, it’s like bad practice, okay? But here’s the biggest problem. That’s not even the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that I added one element which is actually two elements but I’m only given access to one element. I’m not given access to the inner wrapper and right off the bat I’ll tell you that if you’re using let’s say you make a utility class for your grids so you’re like I want to make a utility class for a three column grid so that anytime I need a three column grid I can have it in one second. You can’t use that class on a section because It has an inter rapper that you can’t access without creating additional instructions to target the inter rapper and apply the grid there It’s a nightmare in bricks here, and here’s the fundamental rule that’s being broken, okay?

0:46:15
I’m gonna open bricks real quick just to demonstrate this so that everybody understands How easy and simple this is and should be so I’m going to go to pages add new I’m gonna go to, okay, I don’t know. All right, publish and edit with Bricks. And we add a section. What happens, there is the inner container that is in Oxygen. This is exactly what exists in Oxygen. The difference is I can access it. I can click it, I can do things to it. I can add more of them.

0:46:45
Look at how awesome this is, right? The ability to add multiple page width containers, the ability to put content in the section but outside of the container. Have you ever wanted things to be like full width, for example? Right, so I go here, 100% width. Inside of it, try to do this in a section that doesn’t give you access to the inner container. Very, very difficult to make certain content page width while other content is outside of the page width.

0:47:22
Very, very difficult. Lot of workarounds needed, right? So the principle is very simple. The page builder should not create a wrapper that it does not give the user access to. Very simple principle. If you just follow that principle, you will be like, so much things will go right okay if you’re a if you’re a developer of a page builder do not create wrappers that you do not give the user access to that will solve so many problems okay let’s get out of here all right so this this I think this needs this needs work it should be fixed in oxygen and it should be fixed in breakdance in my opinion.

0:48:01
All right, so we go here and we’re gonna look at what else we can add. So I have the div, which is good. That gets a A plus, A plus on the div. The section gets a B. I’m still giving it a B because it does the inner container correctly, it just doesn’t give you access to it. That’s why it’s not an A. And well, oh God, I got to downgrade it to a C because they also put the padding inside the inner container.

0:48:25
So that gets dropped to a C. So we have a div, we have a section, we’re also looking for a container. A container is a div that is automatically the width of your website. It’s very, very, like, just handy to have. It’s not a must-have, very, very handy to have. So if you are a page builder, developer, and you are listening, please give people a container element that is the width of their website. It’s so handy right so handy saves a lot of time We could show you in bricks. This is a very possible use add a container BAM It also auto centers itself and it’s flex display flex by default So a lot of just helpful things that create lots of less less clicking around to get to what you want The last thing that I would say the fourth most important block is a code block.

0:49:18
And I’m almost certain that they have one. Okay, so this is good. And I guess we add this, we can add PHP, CSS, JavaScript, okay, exactly what you would expect to see. So an A plus on that. All right, the next thing that we want to see is, and all right, let’s just point out the philosophy right here. Notice, this is the big difference you’re going to see. Why don’t I just pull up, let me pull up bricks one more time while we’re there. It helps to see these things side by side so you can really understand why one is not like the other. So let’s do pages, let’s do, it doesn’t matter what page we are looking at. Okay so I’m gonna select this element, this button right here, right? What do you see right here? This is where you add classes to the element. This is a class first builder, a class first workflow.

0:50:07
It wants you to add classes because that’s what you’re supposed to do in web design. But if we look at Breakdance, there is no classes box because it’s not a class first builder, because they wanted it to not be a class. They chose this. It’s not an oversight, okay? It’s they chose for this to be the case. Now, what am I encouraged to do? I’m encouraged to immediately go into these panels and start styling things.

0:50:36
Now, some things like section background color, doesn’t matter. I mean, you’re gonna set different background colors on different sections. You could do this at the ID level all day long. You’re never gonna be like, oh, all those sections need to be this color instead. And if they were, and they’re all the same color, you just change the value of the variable for the color, and you’re fine, whatever.

0:50:55
So this kind of stuff, not really a big deal. But when we start building components like cards, very, very big deal. A lot of stuff, very, very big deal. But they encourage you, you’re encouraged to just start styling things. Just hey, hey, here, style some stuff. And you’re unbeknownst to most people, you’re styling at the ID level and unbeknownst to most people, they don’t know why this is a bad thing because again, who are we targeting?

0:51:22
I don’t know. We’re targeting beginners or intermediate people or element or users, which some element or users consider themselves to be professionals, even though they’re not using a professional builder. So that’s the kind of person you’re targeting. I would rather say, hey, we’re going to target beginners, but we’re also going to teach them just how to do the proper workflow, because that’s in their best interest.

0:51:43
In order to say, and I cover this in my article, that a presets-based workflow or a copy-paste ID workflow is better, you got to make a strong, I wanted to cuss there, you got to make a strong, strong, strong case that that is a better way to go. And you’ve like, it’s gotta be really strong. Because you’re basically saying, throw out everything you know about web design and start doing stuff this way.

0:52:13
Why? Because we think it’s better. Well, why is it better? Show me how it’s better. And so far, all I’ve seen is you can build the site faster. I haven’t seen anything about scalability or maintainability or anything else that really matters to a professional. Just remember, getting from point A to point B, A, oil change, slap duct tape on it, doesn’t leak anymore, got from point A to point B in five minutes.

0:52:35
But we all know that’s not the way to do things, right? So this is why fundamentally, like I personally can’t use the builder because it doesn’t have a class first workflow. Now I’ll tell you how they’re going to fix this. Tell you how they’re going to fix this right now. Actually, uh, bricks to this. So look, you can, you can make both people happy. You can make both user groups happy with one toggle switch. It’s not hard.

0:53:02
So you go to bricks, you go to settings. Here’s why they can’t do this. So I’m going to show you how easy it is to do it. And then I’m going to tell you why they can’t do it. All right, so here we go. So we go to, uh, it’s in here somewhere, Builder, and then there you go right there, Disable Global Classes Interface. And that classes area that we were just looking at will go away.

0:53:24
And now you can use a copy paste workflow in Brics. Why would you ever do that? I don’t know. You should probably be a candidate for some sort of medication if you decided to do that, but they allow you to do it. Okay, they allow you, it’s a possibility. They could do this in breakdance in probably five minutes, right? They could put a class first workflow right here.

0:53:46
Why? Because they already have classes, right? If I go over here, I go, where should I go? Advanced, there you go. Okay, classes. I’ve seen a couple of videos, all right? So here’s the classes box. You can add a class like H1, something like this. Create that. Oh, okay, well, get pro.

0:54:04
I thought I had pro. Maybe I just need to put in a license key. Let’s, let’s, uh, here. I don’t want to show you guys my license key. Let me go over here. I’m going to grab my license key on the other screen. Uh, but I’m going to tell you while I’m doing this, why they can’t do this because the second that they put that feature into break dance, oxygen implodes. That’s the fundamental difference right now between oxygen and Breakdance. Because they’ve cannibalized the repeater, the query loop, the div, all the things that Breakdance wasn’t going to have, the last moat between Breakdance and oxygen feels like the class-first workflow.

0:54:45
So the minute they give you a class-first workflow in Breakdance, I don’t know why you would be using oxygen at that point. So I think they’re stuck. They really can’t offer that in breakdance unless they don’t care about the future of oxygen. That’s kind of a, it’s a tough place to be in. That’s the way I’m viewing it. I don’t have all the internal metrics. I don’t know what their team discusses or how they think.

0:55:06
I’m not claiming any of those things. Just from an outside perspective, feels like that’s the only real big difference at this point now because the other stuff got cannibalized I feel like that would be the nail in the coffin all right let me grab a must be under downloads over here Oh license keys okay let’s pop in a license key and let’s see if I can get yeah there it is that’s a pro license key all right let’s go I’m gonna have to bring the builder off the screen for a second I don’t want anybody stealing my license keys. All right, let’s go here. Even though it’s only the one year license key from Oxygen.

0:55:44
All right, let’s leave. Let’s go to Breakdance. Let’s go to settings. Let’s go license key and save. And now we should be good. So let’s refresh. Okay, back here, pages and edit in Breakdance. Can I add a class now, please? Advanced classes, H1, there it is, bam. Okay, good.

0:56:09
Now I can hit this little pencil right here. And here you go. Now I can start styling the H1 class that I just added. This is a class-based workflow. It’s just not a class-first workflow. Big, big, big difference, right? It’s great that this is here. It’s fantastic that this is here because a lot of things that, you know, I mean, you need this.

0:56:32
You need custom classes, 100% to build a website the right way. But the fact that it’s not front and center is the big problem. Why is it not front and center? I have no idea. There is no explanation in my mind why classes aren’t front and center other than we think people aren’t smart enough to understand what a class is or how to use it.

0:56:52
That’s the only explanation. If there is another explanation, I would absolutely love to hear it. Now, before we go any further, we talked about main stuff, we talked about philosophy, I need to go to the chat and I need to see how people are, what people are thinking here. I found Bricks a little annoying on the styling part. There’s no global CSS, you have to waste a lot of time setting the styles. No there definitely is actually Actually bricks is CSS element by element CSS is very very awesome And if you look at a product like frames you can see how much we use CSS element by element But you can also I would never advocate for somebody to put all their custom CSS in a page builder like in a page builder Style sheet I know oxygen has style sheets that does that like in a page builder style sheet.

0:57:40
I know Oxygen has style sheets that does that, but I would say WP CodeBox is the way to go. I mean, if you’re trying to write CSS as fast as you possibly can, if you want access to Sass when you’re writing CSS, then like WP Code, you should be putting it in WP CodeBox, not in a page builder’s generic style sheet. So I don’t expect a page builder to do that. Unless a page builder is like, hey, we’re gonna give you full SaaS capabilities, and we’re gonna auto suggest your classes and variables for you.

0:58:08
I mean, that would be absolutely fantastic, but I don’t expect them to do that. Does breakdance handle pseudo elements? We’re gonna get to that. We’re gonna get to that. All right, Kevin is targeting people who wanna be professionals, and that is why he is pushing best practices. Yes, I said this, I don’t know why I have to say it over and over and over again.

0:58:23
I’m not targeting the people who want to make Bunko Club websites. That’s not who I’m talking to. That’s not the audience of this channel. I’m talking to anybody who considers themselves to be a professional or who does work for money, which kind of puts you in the category of professional. But if you’re not doing professional things, you’re just like acting as a professional. You’re just like, well, that’s why I call myself. But you’re not really behaving as a professional right a professional in any industry tries to follow best practices a professional in any in any industry uses professional tools a professional in any industry tries to constantly better themselves and not cut corners right and That you would want to go to a photographer that acts like this You would want to go to a mechanic that acts like this You would want to go to a surgeon that acts like this.

0:59:12
You would want to go to a lawyer that acts like this. For some reason, web design is like this industry where everybody’s like, you can use whatever you want. You can do it however you want. No, you just can’t. You’re creating absolute disasters and your clients have no idea. And it’s an expense to the client later on when you’re fixing all this nonsense. And when you are going copy paste from 800 different pages, clients shouldn’t be paying for that for all this inefficiency that you’ve created so yeah it matters how you do things it matters how you approach your work right there are standards that we’re trying to work towards yeah it’s not this is I don’t care about bunco club people those people can go use wicks by the way those people can go use Squarespace no problem right we’re talking to professionals or you know people who I guess, consider themselves to be professional.

1:00:05
All right. Classes in the other tab, yeah, found that. Again, it does not style at the ID level. Okay, it doesn’t style at the ID level. Are you sure about that? So let’s see. Now, I think I know where he’s going with this. I think I know what I’m going to see on the back end. Okay So we’re gonna go class here and let’s let’s get rid. Let me just get rid of this element altogether So we’re not making any mistakes. So let’s just put a clean heading in here and Let’s style this. Okay, so there’s my Okay, typography, why can’t I have a background color here size spacing it’s over here Is it over here no Why can’t you put a background color on a heading?

1:00:55
This is not a thing right here. Okay answer me this question Page building 101 I just the lesson I just released right is Everything is a box Everything in web design is a box a heading is a box It’s just a box with a heading inside of it. But the H1 tag creates an implicit box. That’s why in web design, you can add a background color to it. You can add padding to it. You can have a border to it.

1:01:24
Not seeing those controls here. I mean, you know, advanced, here? No, no, doesn’t look like it. There’s color, right? I get color. Where’s the background, right? Where is the padding? Size? Oh, spacing. Oh, I can do margin and top and margin bottom.

1:01:47
This is very limiting, right? And I’m very limited on this. Where’s my margin left? Where’s my margin right? Where’s my padding? Where’s my border? Where’s my this? Where’s my that? There’s a lot of things I might wanna do to this heading that it seems I’m quite limited on.

1:02:01
And this is the kind of thing you know when a professional picks up a builder They’re like how many roadblocks am I going to run into when using this builder and I of course guys I know I can write CSS. I can target this heading. I can write CSS. I can make it happen, but to me It’s like it’s a it’s a brick wall like I’ve got to navigate around it And how many of those am I going to run into that I have to constantly navigate around? And this is where we get back the philosophy of, oh, you know, the beginners, they’re just not, they can’t comprehend this stuff. Too many panels, and thus a professional picks it up and a professional’s like, not enough panels, can’t do this, can’t do that.

1:02:45
And it’s very basic stuff. This is not, like, adding a background to a heading is not a complex thing. I mean, we can all go to, right, I mean, I can prove this to you right now, because a lot of people feel like they don’t believe me or something, I don’t know. They think, oh, he’s just talking about his ass, he just, he’s nitpicking. Okay, my heading, guys, let’s look at this.

1:03:06
Quit tabbing, okay. All right, so we’re gonna target that H1, yeah? Can I do this? No, come on CodePen, what are you doing? What are you doing? Okay, background color of red. Guys, okay, this is standard, right? You should be able to do these things in web design. Border, five pixel solid black. These are all things most people will be able to do to an H1 tag, because an H1 tag is a box, because everything is a box, right?

1:03:32
But Breakdance is seemingly saying, we’re not gonna give you access to that box. We’re not gonna let you style that box. You can just style the text that’s in it, but you can’t actually style the box, unless I’m missing something. But I shouldn’t be missing it, it should be front and center. It’s a fairly common and simple thing. And these are the roadblocks that I constantly run into, not just in Breakdance, you’ll run into these roadblocks in other builders too, and it’s really frustrating because these roadblocks should not be here But anyway, we were talking about styling at the ID level, so I’m going to go back to front end so I’m going to inspect this right here and And this is going to be their argument guys. It’s not built for you. It’s not built for you. It’s not built for professionals, but then But then they’ll put in an advanced query builder.

1:04:27
The advanced query builder they said it would never have, it has, and that shit ain’t anywhere near beginner territory. So they’ve got these things that are for beginners, right? Oh, beginners can’t figure out, why would a beginner wanna add spacing to a heading one tag? Why would a beginner wanna add a background color to a heading one? Let’s get less panels, less panels.

1:04:47
But what we’ll do is we’ll give the beginners an advanced query builder that they have no fricking clue how to use. It just doesn’t make sense. Like, just make it make sense. You can do whatever you want with the philosophy of your build, just make it make sense. That’s all I ask for, right? It makes total sense to say this is not for professionals, it’s not gonna have professional features, it just is what it is.

1:05:08
If you want a professional builder, go use Oxygen. Totally makes sense, totally makes sense. But then you can’t then add in all the professional features. But keep us from doing the basic things. Because this right now is showing me that, well, oxygen has a fighting chance now to survive. Because oxygen, you know, allows me to do these things. So, and doesn’t create these roadblocks. But let’s go inspect this. So this is what the person was saying.

1:05:35
It doesn’t style it at the ID level. Guys, what’s wrong? I’m just going to go to chat, what’s wrong with that argument right here? You’re 100% right, there’s no ID, there’s no ID. Tell me in the chat based on what you know about styling on the internet, why is this still exactly like styling at the ID level? Please don’t tell me it’s a class not an ID, please don’t tell me that, please don’t tell me that. Somebody in the chat, tell me, everybody chime in. What is the difference here? What is the difference?

1:06:08
All right, let’s go down and see what everybody is talking about. Okay, all right. Give him some time to rage. I’m not, it’s just, you know, I just want things to make sense. Click gear, bottom left, search any property, no different than typing the CSS class, easy adjustment. Okay, so let’s go to Michael let’s go to Michael Michael is uh Michael’s popping off in the chat look I got this anytime you see this you know somebody is somebody is boiling here I do appreciate the thumbs downs to those are it’s perfectly fine all right you All right, you can.

1:06:53
Heading advanced, rapper, background color, background color. Okay, heading advanced, rapper, background color. Jesus, that’s a lot of, okay. Heading advanced, got it, rapper, background color. Man, okay. Let’s ask now, right, because it’s there, and that’s good. It’s good that it’s there. But my question is workflow wise, that’s a lot of inception. That’s a lot of clicks.

1:07:24
That’s a lot of buried deep, right? Why am I using a page builder? Again, go back to page builder 101. This is, guys, it’s why I created the course. It’s why I created the course. We’re using a page builder to expedite our workflow and make things easier. After, before I did all these clicks, I would have just written CSS. Just been done with it.

1:07:48
There’s no way you’re getting me to go into four panels every single time I need to do something that’s important. No way, shape or form, am I gonna consider that a good workflow? And it goes back to why are we using a page builder? Well, beginners are using a page builder because they don’t know shit. They don’t know how to do anything. And so they just need the page builder to do everything for them.

1:08:10
But a professional trying to use a professional tool and grading a tool on is it a professional tool or not a professional tool? A professional wants the page builder to expedite workflow. That’s it. That’s it. We’re doing it because we want to do it faster and we don’t want the monotony of writing all the code. Okay, so that’s why we’re trying to use it.

1:08:30
So if you take something basic and bury it four levels deep, suddenly why am I using the page builder that does this? That’s the question, right? I’m trying to expedite, it’s trying to make me click, click, click, click, click. And suddenly the workflow advantage is not there. Thus, I would choose a builder that has a workflow advantage. If they have the same quality output, choose the one with the workflow advantage. These are very simple arguments, right? Trying to like claim gotcha, it’s there. Okay, it’s there. It’s four levels deep. It’s not really accessible. I couldn’t find it, like it wasn’t very intuitive, okay? Why is it under a wrapper? We already know that it has a wrapper. It could have just been right here, background. The background obviously would apply to the wrapper. I mean, we could sit here and argue this stuff all day long.

1:09:17
I’m just telling you, it’s not a good workflow. And every other builder doesn’t create that workflow. Bricks doesn’t bury that background on a heading four panels deep. Thus, it has a more efficient workflow. This is all we’re trying to point out, right? We’re not saying you can’t use breakdance. If you want to use breakdance, perfectly fine. I’m just pointing out the things that I look for. Like as a professional, these are the things that I look for.

1:09:40
Now, somebody else was, let’s go back to the, let’s revisit this, this, it doesn’t style at the ID thing. And it might’ve been Mikhail that said that, that it doesn’t style at the ID. And so let’s go down, let’s go down. Does anybody see here? Okay.

1:09:53
Yeah, and this is not a review. A hundred percent is why it’s a first impression. I don’t do reviews. And I tell people right off the bat, I don’t. The reason it’s called a first impression is because I would never review a builder after the first time I use it. I would never, ever, it’s not fair to the builder. Not fair to the builder. First impressions are first impressions.

1:10:22
Now, if I spent 40 hours building a website with a builder, then I could leave a review for the builder. I will never claim to review. You’ll see other content creators, they pull up a builder, they go through it for 20 minutes, and then they’re like, here’s my review. And you can’t, you can’t review a builder and like that. So the things I’m harping on, I might be wrong on some things, not objective stuff that we’re talking about in terms of HTML output and stuff like that, but just workflow-wise.

1:10:49
Because you have to use a builder for a long time to really get the hang of its workflow. But I know philosophies, I know class first, first copy paste, right? That’s a big deal. The same class can be applied to things when you save them to reuse. So it’s not styled at ID level, it can also be overwritten with specificity. Guys, this class right here, yes, you can use it.

1:11:14
I totally get you could take that class and reuse it again. Would you ever? No, you wouldn’t do it. You would never do that. You would never do that. Nobody would be like, oh, this this needs BD heading 15 108 styling. Come on. Like, we’ve got to we’ve got to live in reality with the arguments that we’re trying to make. This is my like, I hate these gotcha arguments. It’s not an ID, it’s a class, but practically it doesn’t matter.

1:11:43
It does not, practically it’s an ID. It’s a unique class that’s only on this one element. Or you could reuse it again. Who would ever use BD heading 15-108 again? You have no idea what that is going to do on a 30 page website build. You have no idea what it’s been used on. Like it’s, come on. This is not a practical argument that you’re making right this is effectively an ID it’s effectively an ID yes you can target with specific well you can do that with IDs too so no no real advantage there so we’ve got to live in reality with these things and not don’t don’t make this a gotcha thing okay this is not a gotcha thing I know how classes work.

1:12:25
I know what a unique class is and what a, let’s say a BIM class is versus a utility class. A utility class, very useful. A BIM class, insanely useful. BD heading 15108, zero fricking use. Okay, that’s just a fact. Okay, all right, let’s go back. So I wanna look at query loops. We need to see, let me talk about these elements first. All of these elements, I actually just had a conversation with somebody that was an Elementor user in page building 101, and they asked me a great question.

1:13:05
Well, they kind of challenged, they were like, Elementor, I feel is beating Bricks because they offer all of these pre-made elements that you can add. Like Bricks doesn’t have a call to action element. Bricks doesn’t have a this element. Bricks doesn’t have a that element. And here’s my argument because you see them here. I mean, this is a library of elements right here. And so if I want an icon box, bam, icon box, right? Now, can I add, let’s say another element to this?

1:13:37
Let’s see if I can. Let’s go, let’s just go out of div. Can I drop a div in there? It appears that it’s outside of that box. Let’s drag, oh, we, nope, we can’t drag it in. So this icon box seemingly is very helpful, but it’s also very, very limiting. As you can see, I can’t, I’m having trouble adding other things to it, right? So if I needed other things to be done with this man that’s that’s tough right so imagine that there were 40 of these imagine that they were across multiple pages and then the clients like we really need to add XYZ and you’re like about that you see right now please correct me if I’m wrong if I can add custom elements to this please like correct me if I’m wrong, I would love to know if that’s a possibility.

1:14:31
But if you can’t, that’s a big problem. Big, big, big problem. For scalability, maintainability, customization, big, big, big problem, okay? And again, I said, what happens when the client asks, right? Because I ain’t talking about Bunko Club websites, I’m talking about real clients in the real world. Now, my argument to them was, I would love a builder that doesn’t have any of these things. Okay, let me go back to add. I don’t think any of these things need to exist.

1:14:56
Well, not all of them. Let me I’m going to make a very clear distinction. Okay. And in fact, in bricks, you can actually remove the ones that you don’t want, which makes this all very nice and clean. Oh, I love it. I love it. I call it pro mode for bricks, right? Hey, if you’re a professional, these are the ones you should remove because they really have no value to you build your own, right? The distinction is very clear if the element adds PHP or JavaScript functionality it’s probably important to have if all it does like this is create HTML structure and lock you into that HTML structure and lock you in to various methods of styling without BIM, without classes. This is a severe limitation. So now this is breakdance is all built around this. Many of the Elementor is all built around this. They want to give you these helpful things.

1:16:00
Why? Because you you’re dumb. You don’t know how to build it yourself. Now, you’re like, well, Kevin, I do know how to build it myself. I just want it to happen faster. Well, then buy frames, right? Get frames. Frames is we did the HTML for you, but here’s the big difference. I mean, you got to be able to see the difference, right? When you add a frame feature card that looks like this, you can do anything else in the world that you would ever want to do to it. When you add this, you can’t.

1:16:29
And if you don’t think that’s a big difference, I mean, I don’t know what to tell you, right? You’re probably building Bunko Club websites, not for clients in the real world. All right, so let’s see. Questions in the chat. I was hoping somebody would pop in and tell me if I can add other things to this. I just, I don’t want to sell it short in five minutes. Inspect element to add same class to another heading.

1:16:54
Not a good practice. You don’t copy paste it as a class. You can save it and reuse it through UI. A lot of you are having side conversations. Some settings should be easier to access. The background color is definitely one of them and also the padding and margin settings. The advanced search function is helpful. Ruben says as a breakdance fan, the workflow can improve. And yeah, look guys, the workflow in Bricks can improve.

1:17:24
The workflow in every builder can improve. I am never going to tell you that Bricks is perfect, Bricks is done, Bricks is like, it’s just, it is the way it is, and it’s amazing, and it should never change going forward, never update. I’ll tell you that, here, you want me to throw bricks under the bus? No problem doing that. The way that they manage pseudo elements in bricks is a fricking horror show. I truly feel that, and I don’t ever use it. I just write custom CSS for pseudo elements and I move on with my life, because the way pseudo elements are managed in bricks is an absolute horror show.

1:17:59
So for those of you who think, oh, you just want to pick on this builder, no, I’ll pick on bricks. I’ll pick on any builder, choose any, they can all be improved. But here’s the thing, right? It’s like you’re in a relationship with somebody and you know their underlying philosophy and personality and you’re like, that’s what I love about them. They snore, they do this, they do that, but I can live with that because underneath they’re an amazing person, right?

1:18:25
This is how everything in life works. Nobody’s perfect. We know the general beliefs that a person has and the values that they hold, and then we make decisions. And we live with the things that we don’t like, all right? I didn’t wanna be your therapist today, but here I am. Now we look at page builders and we say, Bricks, Bricks, man, I love you. You have this class first philosophy, you have this clean code output philosophy, you allow me to do everything that I would ever want to do, but you snore.

1:19:00
Your pseudo elements workflow is atrocious. But I live with that, I live with that because the underlying philosophy is in perfect alignment with web design. Oxygen, my gosh, Oxygen, I love you and your class first workflow. I love your clean code output This is phenomenal, but you snore your section element Has an inter wrapper that I can’t access and it actually creates a lot of really big problems But I live with that Right, and I don’t nitpick at all. You know, it’s just you live with it Why because at the core, this is a fantastic builder.

1:19:40
At the core, Bricks is a fantastic builder. Elementor, you snore, you’re fricking ugly, there’s no redeeming quality about you. You don’t have values, you don’t have standards, you don’t have anything, you don’t have anything. Elementor is not a professional builder, okay? So we have to make decisions, like I can’t live with certain things when the core philosophy is not there. We’re not in alignment with the core philosophy.

1:20:13
And again, the core philosophy of web design is HTML, CSS, class first approach. That is the core philosophy. So a builder is diverging from the core philosophy of web design and saying embrace me everybody professionals non-professionals come in and the professionals are going to be like I can’t embrace that I can’t embrace that or that’s kind of how they how they should feel unless it’s demonstrated that copying and pasting styles and copying and pasting elements is somehow more efficient or way better than the actual approach that web designers use and I haven’t seen that case made yet.

1:20:52
In fact, I’ve seen exactly the opposite. And this is why I feel the way that I feel. And so you can say, well, the workflow needs to improve. But I can say that about any builder. Core philosophy, unless they change the core philosophy, we’re not compatible. It’s an incompatibility. All right. So nobody, nobody corrected this. Nobody said, hey, you can add other things to that. So I’m just assuming you can’t and Yeah, you can’t add elements to the icon box. It’s a pre-made element. So there you go right there I wouldn’t I could never safely use this you could never safely use this on a serious website Multi-page website you can’t because you’ve locked yourself in you can’t change the HTML structure if the client asks for something You can’t add it so what at that point do you fix this is a perfect example client says I want to add XYZ to these feature boxes and you go sorry Jack can’t do that why can’t you do it well our builder doesn’t allow you to do it why are you using that builder I thought you were a web developer I thought you were a professional make it happen so you’re like yes sir yes sir I will make it happen right we all know fricking Judy and accounting I can’t keep track of their names, right?

1:22:02
So today it’s Judy. Judy in accounting had this brilliant idea and she sold the board on it. And now they’re coming in saying, we gotta do these things with our feature cards. And so you are like, okay, all right. And that feature card is on, it’s on seven different pages. And so what you do is you actually design a new one from scratch, not using this pre-made element. And then you go replace it everywhere that it exists.

1:22:25
And that is misery. And are you charging the client for that? How dare you? How dare you charge the client for that? You screwed up in the first place by using a non-scalable, non-maintainable element to save time. If you don’t think this stuff matters in a professional environment, I don’t know what to tell you.

1:22:45
You can’t safely use this element for a client site. You just can’t, you can’t. Okay, and they’re all gonna be like that. That’s why I turn them off in Bricks. I get rid of them all. Every one of these things can be built from scratch and should be built from scratch. And then you should have them classes, style them. And I know how Lewis feels. Lewis has said, if you want to build websites with divs and classes, I think you’re crazy.

1:23:15
I’m fairly certain, that’s a almost exact quote, which is crazy to me because he’s basically telling every professional web developer, you’re crazy. Following the fundamental workflow of web design is crazy somehow. Okay, I think it’s crazy to add a pre-made element that you can never add to or iterate on or expand in the future on a client site. They could ask for a new feature at any given day, right? That to me is crazy. Okay, so get rid of all of these.

1:23:51
Now I did make that distinction because I know people don’t listen very well. If it adds PHP functionality, if it adds JavaScript functionality, think about toggles, accordions, things like this. Now those are beneficial. Those are beneficial, especially if they don’t lock you in. In Bricks, I can add an accordion, but guess what? I can stuff other elements into the accordion if I want them to be there.

1:24:13
It’s an open-ended accordion element. It’s an open-ended carousel element. It’s not a pre-made carousel element that doesn’t allow me to do anything else with it other than what was allowed by the builder. It is an open-ended element. That’s how they should be in a professional page builder. So these are the things that we look for. Okay. Where do y’all want to go next?

1:24:34
Oh, custom post types, right? We were like, can we query loop this stuff up? Cause this is another very, very important thing. Let’s go out here. We’re going to need to add one thing. Exit to WordPress. Yes. So we’re going to go over here and just drop in a plugin real quick. So we’re going to go MetaBox. And we’re going to install that.

1:25:03
All right. So very, very, very, very, very, very, very common. OK. Why am I not seeing MetaBox? MetaBox, where are you? Activate, okay. I’m not gonna have to install the pro version, am I? Guys, where the hell did, where’s, normally I have a meta box thing right here. Where did it go?

1:25:24
Somebody tell me. What are you seeing that I’m not seeing? Sometimes, you know, I’m live, it’s things like this like to happen on live. I’ll install the pro version if I have to but I really don’t want to Deactivate docs about GoPro create custom meta boxes and custom fields and WordPress Yeah, I mean that would be nice if you will let me let me do it anybody anybody All right, let’s let’s add new let’s go to upload plug-in All right. Strato says add the pro.

1:26:02
Is that really? Certainly that’s not necessary though. Plugins, Metabox, Metabox. Hopefully I won’t need a license key. Yeah, of course, of course there’s an update available. Okay, here it is now. Post, can I do something with it? Ah, that’s why we need the update, okay. All right, let me bring this over here. You can’t look at my license key Just hang on one second. I will get this going All right, there’s my license key got it plugins meta box Let’s go to settings license license key save. Okay. Now we can bring it back on the screen All right. Now we can go to plugins now we can go to Come on now with the automatic update is unavailable. What are you doing? All right, let’s go to CPT UI There are always always other avenues All right, custom post type add edit post type very very common thing services services service I I have a whole video on top 10 uses for custom post types, how you should be using custom post types as a professional web designer in WordPress, yada, yada, yada, right?

1:27:12
So if you don’t know why we’re doing this part of it, definitely go watch that video. If you are doing service-based companies, you should be using CPTs. You want reviews on your website, you should be using CPTs. You want locations on your website, you should be using CPTs, okay? Populate additional fields, I’m gonna use this in forever. Man, this is nostalgic. Okay, so there is my services.

1:27:45
We’re gonna add a new service, service number one. And we are going to publish, publish and go back. And then we’re going to add new service number two. I just wanna add three of them real quick. And I’m gonna go back and add number three, service number three. Publish, publish, there you go. All right, so we’ve got three services in a custom post type. Now we go to pages, add new, and services. All right, publish. So we’re creating a services page of sorts.

1:28:15
I’m going to add a section. Bam, just like that. I’m going to add a, I want a grid. I want a grid. How do we have a grid? How do we have a grid? So normally what I would do is add a container, okay? Cause you need a container to put the grid in, but there is no container element. So I’m gonna add a div element.

1:28:34
And on that div element, I am going to make it 100% width, which I hoped would have been under layout. Okay, let’s look around. Why isn’t width right here? Background container, here we go, width, 100%, good. Now, normally you would have grid controls on here, right? But we don’t, you just have these alignment controls, so you can align things inside using Flexbox. But I really, really wanna use grid. I don’t think grid is supported.

1:29:05
All right, so we’re gonna do one other. See, these are the things like all right it’s um you know you’re watching you’re watching what happens when like you’re you’re looking for a professional workflow and then you’re just constantly running into challenges so what I have to do is I have to go to add new then I have to bring up this plugins box again and I got a WP code box and I got a drag oh well that was the wrong one all right thank you let’s go out here plugins add new See, I don’t am I like supposed to charge the client for this time? I’m not so sure. All right, let’s activate plug-in and bricks. My grid would have been done I would already been done. But here we are WP code box now global SAS thank you inline minify, save, enable, save, auto reload here.

1:30:05
Grid, what do we want? We want three, right? So I’m just gonna quickly make a utility class. All right, we’re gonna display this as a grid. We’re gonna go grid, template, columns, repeat, three, min, max, zero, one, fr. Okay, and we will go with, that’s it for now. Let’s just see if we can get this working. And I also want to check something else in terms of breakdance.

1:30:29
Classes, my class, grid three, add. Okay, let’s add divs. Div, div, div, div, div. One, two, three. Oh dear. Grid three is on there, save. Front end. Now we inspect Okay inspect All right, here’s my container it’s got grid three Okay There we go.

1:31:03
So I’ve got to override, I’ve got to importantize it, which I don’t like to do. And now can I throw a gap on there? Now that I have established a grid, the question is can I throw a gap on there? So we’re going to grab that div right there. The gap feature right here should still work. I’m just going to throw in random stuff. There you go. Okay. Now, okay, we’ve surpassed roadblock number one. Now what I would like to do, and people will be like, Kevin, use Flex, use Flex for this.

1:31:45
Use the columns element in Breakdance. I saw that earlier. There it is, columns. Could I have done that? I don’t wanna use Flexbox for this. Flexbox is inferior to Grid for this type of layout. So I, again, professional workflow, I would rather not use the inferior tools. I would rather use the better tool, which is grid, but it’s not available, so I gotta do this workaround thing.

1:32:10
Okay, we’re just showing roadblocks in a workflow. This is why, like headaches, right? Headaches not in another builder, this is why I might choose the other builder, right? But the columns element, columns is not an element in web design, all right? This is like a pre-done little thing to try to help you out with using Flexbox. But again, it’s not a great use of Flexbox in my estimation. All right, so now I need a query loop.

1:32:35
So now I need help from the breakdancers. Where are the breakdancers? Tell me where is, how about we search for query loop? Okay, loop. Oh, we got a post loop builder or a repeater field. Which one do I want? I’m gonna guess that I want the repeater. So I’m gonna add the repeater and it did not add the repeater to my div. Oh, and this is another question. Is it like oxygen where repeater is a container or is it like bricks where the repeater is an element?

1:33:01
This element has no content. Okay, let’s put the div in the repeater. Oh, oh, oh, I’m having trouble. Drag, drag, drag. I can’t, okay. All right, this is where maybe documentation would come in handy. Global block, you can’t choose. All right, break the answers. Am I supposed to be using the repeater or the post loop? Because there’s two of them. Which one do you want me to use?

1:33:27
Grid coming next version, that’s fantastic. Good to hear. What am I supposed to use, repeater or post loop? Well, let’s while I’m waiting, let’s throw in a post loop. All right, so add loop post loop builder. Choose a global block from the drop down. Don’t make me don’t make me use a global block, please, please, whatever you do, please don’t make me use a global block. I want to build my block right here. The way I do in Oxygen, the way I do in Bricks.

1:34:05
Because right now what you’re telling me is, hey, hey, hey, hey, pause the workflow and go to this other area over here. Create a different workflow over here. Then come back to this area and you can resume your workflow. Again, we’re supposed to be making this more efficient, right, I’m in a workflow of building a page, I don’t wanna leave this workflow the same. I have the same problem with generate press when you’re creating the global Presets or not not global just yeah presets when you’re playing creating presets in generate press you have to leave your page building Workflow to go to the presets area create a preset element Then you can go back and like import your preset element into man, man I don’t I don’t want to be dancing. This is not I didn’t sign up for dance lessons.

1:34:52
I want to just work on my workflow. I’m building a page. Let me build the elements that go on the page. Okay. It’s, it’s having me go somewhere else is a, is a disaster of a workflow. I don’t, I don’t want to do that. All right. I’m coming down repeater or yeah, he’s there. There you go. Edward says you have to create a global block first. Not going to happen. Okay, juxtapose. Here we go.

1:35:19
Local bricks open. I’m just going to demonstrate. I’m just going to demonstrate. Here’s reviews. How many reviews do we have? None? All right. Let’s just repeat this. So we’re gonna go review number one. Publish. You can ignore why this is like gigantic. I was playing around with Gutenberg settings. Let’s go back. Let’s go review number two. Publish. Let’s go back just as a demonstration here. Okay. Review number three. So we’re talking about workflow efficiency, which I think, I mean, guys, tell me in the chat is workflow efficiency, not a big deal to you.

1:35:52
Like, is it a big deal or not a big deal? I don’t want to harp on stuff. If like every professional is like, oh, the workflow is not a big deal. I don’t want to harp on it, but I just feel like everybody feels like this is a big deal. All right, so we’ve got our three reviews. So I’m going to go pages, add new, reviews. Okay, and then we’re going to go edit with Bricks. So here’s the section. Look, look, look, hey, well, first of all, I can just use a utility class, right, to make my three column grid, but I’m not gonna do that to you.

1:36:26
I’m just gonna show you if there is no natively in bricks, I can just do it and all fairness, I get it. They haven’t released grid yet. Okay, no problem. But I can go to display grid. I can do the exact same thing you just saw me do in code box, right? I can go repeat and then we can do three min max that we have our zero and our one FR. Now I have a three column grid in Bricks just like that. Now when I add divs or blocks it doesn’t really matter. I can go bang bang bang and now I have my three column grid. You can see it right there. Then I can put a gap on here if I want to. Okay and now we’re going to continue with our workflow. The workflow we’re trying to get is let’s create some review cards. So now what we’re going to do, I actually don’t need the other two. We only need the third one or this first one right here. So see this little button right here that says use query loop you can just activate that and then you can say oh well I want posts my post type is going to be reviews and I’m pretty sure that’s all you need by default. So then we’re gonna hit save and then we’re just gonna start building our review card. So we would put like a heading in there we would put like text in there look at what’s happening on the screen my friends like isn’t this the right workflow then I can even add a card.

1:37:41
I can say, hey, this is my review card. Look, class first workflow. This is my review card. Let me go ahead and copy that and then go heading. And then this is my review card. Hey, class are too hard to add. You don’t have to think of the term. I hear all these frankly dumb arguments about classes. And then I can just dynamically insert the data. Oh my God, what do I want this to be?

1:38:03
I want it to be the post title, okay? And it’s gonna give me a review one, review two, review three, all that good stuff. There they are right there. Okay, so then I can review on the front. Oh my gosh, we’re dynamically adding content to the page. My workflow is preserved. Like how much faster can it possibly get? If you make me go to some other special magic area, oh, you gotta go to the magic area to create a magic component.

1:38:25
Then you can come back and you can use the magic component in your workflow. Like, I just created a magic component right here in this workflow. The aren’t the these are like important things, aren’t they? Ruben says you would create a global block to design the car then use the global right, right. Ed aware does agree in editor would have been the best solution just like in oxygen. Yeah, big game changer for looping things in bricks, 100%. I honestly don’t think it can get any better.

1:38:56
And you know, another builder just acknowledging that and be like, dude, they mastered it. Like, it doesn’t get much better than that. Let’s just mimic it, right? I could totally respect that you don’t always you don’t have to do everything different you have to reinvent the wheel they just they just did it I mean you saw how easy it was okay and then you know I have global styling control over this now because of some simple classes hey can I go easily add padding why yes you can right so 1m on all sides and then I can add my background color which is sitting right here and you can do whatever you want. Let’s just make it ugly and make it red.

1:39:42
Let’s just make all of this ugly. I don’t have any of my color palettes in and set up. Okay, so hey, there’s your heading right there, right? Hey, oh my God, it’s revolutionary. A heading can have a background color. So, you know, it’s all just, it’s just sitting right there for you. There’s no roadblocks. There’s no, this is why people choose. Okay, so, but back to the philosophy, back to the core underlying philosophy.

1:40:08
You just watch the class first workflow. What was wrong with it? Somebody tell me, what did you see wrong or inefficient about this workflow right here that I just showed you? Because I think I’ve shown, right? I can go back to break dance. I can go to a different area, I can make a component, I can come back here, I can insert the component. Then when I want to change a component, I guess I have to go back to the magic block area, change it over there, and it’ll change everywhere, right?

1:40:36
I guess that’s the philosophy. Or maybe I can copy, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, however many times that element exists, especially if I’m not using it in a loop, right? Like a loop helps a little bit just for the fact that you have one element to worry about and all the others are dynamically created. But I mean, these are, this workflow is a thing, is a big deal. It’s the biggest deal in page building. And it should be things that, I don’t know why I’m the only one talking about it.

1:41:07
I really have not seen anybody else talking about it. I feel like it’s the biggest deal in page building. This idea of we’re gonna reject the class first workflow the way that web design is. We’re gonna reject the workflow of web design and we’re gonna create a new workflow for users to use. And this new workflow is gonna have severe limitations, but it’s somehow gonna be easier. And those two things don’t jive for me. All right, let’s go to the chat.

1:41:35
Questions need to be all caps question. I really okay squinting yet he says I really feel like Lewis has made these things harder to prove it’s not oxygen. You could make a you could make an argument. I mean, look, they couldn’t, they couldn’t just come out and say, we rebuilt oxygen, but you have to buy it. That he already said that he explicitly said that because, you know, the oxygen people with Ltd is would have, you know, burn the whole thing down. So they couldn’t do that. So yeah, things have to be different from oxygen. And that’s why I just said, if they add a class first workflow, it gone, it gone. And so people, you know, people argued with me for endlessly, they were like, oxygen will continue to be around, it’ll continue to be updated, it’ll continue to be this and that.

1:42:29
And Bricks isn’t gonna kill oxygen. I never said Bricks was gonna kill oxygen, but Breakdance will. Breakdance can. The minute Breakdance gets a class first, and you can’t rule it out because we thought the repeater wasn’t coming and it did. We thought the div wasn’t coming and it did. We thought the query builder wasn’t coming and it did. Class first workflow comes.

1:42:49
And I hate that. I hate that, that that is the fact, right? It has nothing to do with how I feel about breakdance or how I feel, I love oxygen. You guys know how many oxygen videos I created. I love oxygen, still like oxygen a lot. I want oxygen to live on. I want oxygen, why would I not want oxygen to be successful? This is what the haters never seem to ask this question of themselves. Why would he want oxygen? He built automatic CSS for oxygen. That was the first builder that we built it for.

1:43:29
Then we made it compatible with bricks. The more copies of oxygen that get sold, the more copies of automatic CSS that could get sold. And so people are like, Oh, he just hates oxygen wants it to go away. Why would I ever want oxygen to go I want oxygen to be the second biggest bit if ox it bricks was like Elementor bricks was number one, and oxygen was number two, that would be the best possible world that I could live in and so it’s proof the fact that I will get on here and talk about Oxygen’s problems and bricks as problems and that these builders that Automatic CSS is for Shows you I’m just telling you how it is. I’m just telling you what I think and believe Absolutely, it would benefit me to get up here and say it’s all fricking rainbows and unicorns and roses.

1:44:28
I could be like that dude from, what was the Iraqi minister, right? The tanks are in the background, everything’s on fire, and he’s like, it’s all good, there’s nothing to see here, there’s no war going on, right? I could just do that. I could just pull the wool over everybody’s eyes, that every one of these builders is amazing. Make automatic CSS for breakdance, make it for Elementor, make it for this, and just say, hey, yeah, everybody buy it.

1:44:51
Everybody use all these builders, anything you want to do. I could do that. I’m not gonna do that. That’s not how I work. So I want the page builders to do things really well, and I want to build products that are really good products to go with those page builders. And if a page builder’s not doing things really well, like Elementor, right, like Divi, then I’ll say, look, we’re not going into that market.

1:45:18
And we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna get, I cannot get on videos and tell people with, and still like maintain any ounce of integrity and be like, use Divi, use Divi, make sure you buy ACSS for it. But use Divi, use Elementor, just make sure you buy ACSS for it. I’m not gonna do that. I’m not gonna make those videos. Not in a million years. I’m just going to say that builder is not compatible.

1:45:39
That builder is not a professional builder. It’s just the facts. If it was all about money, I would go to Elementor tomorrow. I’d sit down and be like, Mateo, Andrea, everybody get in here, get at this table. We have got to find a way to make ACSS work in Elementor, because we can sell a gazillion copies of it. We would do that tomorrow if that’s all we cared about. Haven’t done it, not even entertaining it, don’t care, don’t care. I want people to use the builders that professionals should be working in a professional workflow.

1:46:12
All right. You think Oxygen will keep updating with Breakdance coming to the battle? Yeah, I mean, as long as Breakdance doesn’t have a class first workflow, there’s still a very good argument for using Oxygen. Ah, Baghdad Bob, that was it. My man, Andrew. Okay, thank you. Oxygen will need to update its whole platform to be future proof, okay.

1:46:39
We don’t really need to harp on Oxygen all that much. We’re just, we’re talking about Breakdance. Now I could go into all of these elements and we can look at them, are they accessible? Are they this? Are they that? The problem is it doesn’t matter now. It doesn’t matter because of the incompatibility of the underlying philosophy in my estimation. And so a Breakdance user will come on here and say, look, you can build a card, you can copy and paste.

1:47:08
Let’s just do it, let’s just do it. Let’s just build the card I don’t care about the post loop. Let’s just build a card. So I’m gonna do a heading This is what we have to do. Okay, I’m gonna use the proposed What I believe is the proposed workflow this is going to be an h3 and then we are going to add a text element and then we are going to add a button element and then all right that’s it so layout let’s go we’re just going to do this nice and simple so I want to use I want to do padding so I’m going to go to container padding okay this is nitpicking this is 100% this is nitpicking I don’t want to click on this pencil I don’t want to have anything to do with this pencil right here I just want my padding fields to be there so I’m going to click on the pencil it’s going to open this little modal. Alright so we’re going to come into M’s let’s just do two. Bam there we go. Now I want to add a gap. Let’s do a 1M gap. Perfect.

1:48:12
Let’s give this a background color. Is this fast? Yep. Would never argue with is this fast. I just don’t care about front-end speed All right. So what are we going to do? We’re going to do? Borders, I’m looking for a border border border border border border It’s probably under container borders. There we go. Okay radius. Let’s go with 1m. Bam. Just like that Okay, there is my card Now what I’m going to do Is try copy paste. I don’t even know if I have to turn on shortcuts or anything else. Okay, good. Bam, bam, bam. Okay, that’s nice, right? Hey, we’re gonna have nine features. Now, this is an H3. I believe this H3 is looking a little unruly to me, but I believe that this is a part of global settings because that’s how it is in most builders, including Oxygen.

1:49:10
Base size. Okay. I don’t care. Let’s go to headings. Let’s go to h3. There we go. All right and font size Two three, oh gosh one point three One point four quit it. It keeps it keeps deleting the period Okay, that’s that’s that’s decent. All right, so now buttons I believe I can style those globally too, right? All right, so now buttons I believe I can style those globally too, right? These are by the way, let’s clear something up. I wrote the article on presets these I do not consider to be presets These are not preset. These are global styles. You can style things globally in CSS, too That’s not a preset a preset is a replacement for a class-based workflow. So if you look at something like generate blocks.

1:50:03
Generate blocks, you have to go to a presets area, you can create components like this. You can create a card and instead of giving it classes, you give it preset names. And then you style the presets and that’s what I’m talking about when I talk about presets. This is global styles. This is completely different from presets. I have no problem with something like this.

1:50:24
So size, what am I doing? I don’t care about the size, I just wanted the color. Here we go, backgrounds, let’s make it like, let’s make it, yeah, let’s make it ugly. Let’s make it as ugly as we can possibly make it. Okay, I can make it an outline button, typography is fine, okay, I don’t care, save. All right, let’s go just view things on the front end real quick, and then what we’re gonna do is exit to front end.

1:50:47
We’re gonna pretend, okay? Here comes Jan, Jan in fricking accounting, as usual, would really like it if all of our cards had a box shadow and if that, you know, she loves box shadows. Jan in fricking accounting loves her box shadows and she would like all these cards to have box shadows. And she wants the border radius to not, she loves sharp corners too. So she’s gonna go get rid of the border radius, change the background color, and add a box shadow.

1:51:22
Okay, here’s the workflow. So the first thing I’m gonna do is tackle the border radius. So I’m gonna go back to container borders, and I’m gonna say that this is zero. Okay, good. So now I have one square card and a lot of rounded cards. Now I’m gonna change the background color to the background color she requested guys. Which one do you think Jan would request? Like that that’s probably what Jan would request right all right? So we’re going to do that and then our box shadow we need our box shadow, so we’re going to go to I Would think it would be on container, but clearly I’m wrong, so I’m going to go to here advanced. Maybe it’s on wrapper Maybe it’s on effects Hey, I found it! That’s a lot of clicks though, a lot of clicks. All right so we’ve got a 5, let’s just go 5 here, a 75, oh looks pretty good out of the box.

1:52:14
Okay so all right we got our Jan card. Jan is now happy but now what are we supposed to do? So I’m going to go copy, copy Paste design. Okay, and then I’m gonna go what can I command V this? Nope, can I command V? Nope Is there tell me right now? Is there a shortcut for this? Is there a shortcut shortcut shortcut shortcut Any shortcuts I love you guys. You’re the best.

1:52:43
Bev is working for Elementor now. Is there a shortcut? Please tell me I don’t have to right click this every time. Just please, don’t tell me. Don’t tell me that’s a misogyny Wednesday. No, because everybody knows there’s also a bill in shipping. I believe bill works in shipping. We talk about bill and shipping all the time. I don’t know why I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the bill.

1:53:02
I’m talking about the bill. I’m going to say no, because everybody knows there’s also a bill in shipping. I believe bill works in shipping. We talk about bill in shipping all the time. All right, let’s see. Paste design, I’m just going to do this. This is what, this is, I believe this is what they advocate for. Which, you know, like I said, if I’m building a landing page, like, and it’s never going to be anything more than that, I mean, whatever, it’s fine.

1:53:41
Very chump-like behavior, as you guys have heard on the past in this channel, but it’s still doable. But the minute this becomes a multi-page issue, I mean, this is a nightmare. Can you try holding shift and pacing on more than one element? Okay, let’s go backwards. Let’s try. Boom, boom, boom, boom.

1:54:03
Oh, shift, click. No, no. Command, no. Even, it doesn’t really matter. Even if I could select all of these at the same time and then hit paste, there’s no way to select this across pages. So, no, I tried shift, control, V. But actually I have this app called Paste and that might be interfering. So in all fairness, it could very well be shift ctrl V And that could be interfering with it shortcuts list in the three dots menu Preferences I don’t know But but like I said It doesn’t matter because even if I could select all of these this doesn’t extend to any other pages on the website And that’s really where all of this all of this fails.

1:54:49
You could have given the box a class at the beginning and then adjusted it globally. Okay, perfect. Let me elevate this right here. Everybody go read my article about presets versus classes. In fact, here, I’ll show you. It says right here. Because I knew this was gonna be the argument that people would make. Well, breakdance still allows you to have classes. You should have put a class on there in the first place Okay, let’s find it. It’s in a list. It’s easy to find Any attempt to overcome the limitations of presets or copy paste whatever, you know There’s many different workflows that are not class first creates a major separation of styles issue And then my main argument was this, you can’t tell me to use a different workflow and then because it’s better or faster or whatever you want to call it, you can’t tell me to use this different workflow and then when that workflow fails, tell me, oh, you should have used the old workflow.

1:55:53
That’s not a viable argument. No, I should have just used the old workflow from the beginning because it’s the tried and true standard workflow of web design. Like you saw in Bricks, add the elements, add the classes, style the classes, move on with your life. Now I’m forced into this copy-paste workflow. Copy-paste workflow fails because it’s a multi-page website and then you go, you should have added classes.

1:56:16
Well, what are we doing here? Of course I should have added classes. That’s why I said in the beginning that we should have used a class-first workflow and we should use a builder with a class-first workflow. So, you guys see, right? Like, I don’t, it’s not my preference. This is not a preference. This is like objective reality. It’s staring us in the face.

1:56:37
It’s just whether you accept it or not. That’s it. All right. And this is the proof positive of objective reality that’s staring us all in the face. When the non-class-based workflow fails, everybody says, we should use classes. Obviously, you’re right. So there’s no need for this other workflow, is there? This other workflow is not the right workflow.

1:57:06
Yeah, the workaround should be the standard, not the workaround. All right. Now, you could create a global block. Now let’s talk about global blocks. Do you wanna know where bricks, here’s another area where bricks fails. You wanna know another area where bricks fails? Componentizing things. I want to be able to create a service card component.

1:57:30
Right now, I’ve created, a service card component. Right now, I’ve created, here’s a review card, whatever. So here’s the ugliest review card you’ve ever seen. Approved by Bev and all of her friends. But I can control this with BIM. So I created custom classes on everything. I have global control of the styling of this. What I don’t have control over is the HTML. So, for example, you would never want to do this, but if I wanted all of these cards to have the review come before the heading.

1:58:11
Now, maybe you would do this, right? Maybe this is the person’s name or something. Just pretend we have the name, then the review, but we decided to make a change, we want review, then the name. So then I can drag this in a global component. I could drag this and affect the HTML of every card now it’s going to affect this here because they’re in a loop Okay, but this is not a multi-page thing. This would not this is only affect this loop in this one instance on this page a True component would give me global styling control. It would give me global HTML control and There is a builder that does this and it’s Webflow.

1:58:50
So if you want to look at how Webflow handles components, there’s other things I don’t like about Webflow, by the way, but if you want to look how, Webflow crushed it. Webflow crushed it with global components. And this is something that is missing from Bricks. And if I was advising the Bricks team, I would say that this global components thing that behaves like Webflow, number one on the list. Do whatever you need to do to make this happen in Bricks. Oxygen, I know Elijah’s here, okay?

1:59:22
If you want to do something special for oxygen and kick it up a big, big, big notch, look at how Webflow handles global components and make that happen inside of Oxygen. So I’ll say that. At this point, you can use advance and create a class and style the card. Okay. See, these are all, it’s all, it’s all this, you know, this, I’ve seen the same arguments. So, that’s why I can write the article and already know what all the arguments are going to be.

1:59:52
And I’ve, I’ve been doing this for 20 years, right? So, when somebody says, well, presets are better than classes. Okay. I sit and I brainstorm and I go, how can I make presets fail? Because I need to know I don’t want to know, you know, 20 pages in to a website that presets fail So I just think I’m like, how can I break it? How can I break it? How can I tonight I went into generate press and I broke the presets in five minutes a guy already knew All right. Well and the arguments are right there. The screenshots are right there if you want to go see It took me five minutes to break presets in multiple different ways and so then I fall back to Classes are the standard work. We’re building with CSS I just don’t understand the argument of let’s build a site and style it with CSS which you have to do, but let’s abandon 90% of what CSS is all about let’s just toss that out and somehow it’s all going to work out and somehow it’s going to be Much better. I just never bought that from the beginning.

2:00:49
And in my experience, I haven’t lived it either. Every time I live that workflow, it’s a nightmare. And guys, I built sites in Divi. I’ve built multi-page sites in Divi. I’ve never, full transparency, I’ve never built a site in Elementor. Not a full site, don’t have to though, don’t have to. But in Divi, I built multiple sites in Divi. When I come to you and say, this is a horror show, it’s because I was the starring actor in the horror show for multiple years.

2:01:18
And I don’t want you to be a starring actor in that horror show. I would like you to avoid that horror show, if at all possible. So that’s where my advisement is coming from. I’ve lived these workflows of copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, paste. And it’s like deja vu. It’s like we build a brand new builder and go And I’m like global style control. How do you do copy paste?

2:01:41
No, I already I already was the starring actor in that nightmare and I don’t need to live that again I don’t need to be recast in that role. No, thank you all right, so Based on the screenshots, it’s way worse than the step over now Okay, so people are saying in the chat, Breakdance was created to compete with Elementor, right? Or take Elementor’s market share. If Louis wants an endorsement, if Elijah wants an endorsement, I’ll tell them right now, Breakdance, if you have to decide between Elementor and Breakdance, and maybe this was the only thing Louis ever wanted to hear, if you have to decide between Breakdance and Elementor, Breakdance every day of the week. Hands down, every day of the week you should use Breakdance. This is not even a question. There’s not even an, I won’t even attempt to argue it. Elementor is a dumpster fire. Elementor is awful. So if that’s the decision that we’re making, if that’s the context that we’re having this conversation in.

2:02:51
There’s no discussion in my estimation. And he could clip this if he wants to. He can use this in his ads if he wants to. I don’t care. Lewis, you have 100%. You can clip this and use it in your ads. There you go. Elementor, it’s not even an option. If this is the choice, okay? So you use Breakdance, not Elementor every day of the week.

2:03:14
100%. So, if that’s what certain Breakdance people wanted to hear or whatever, you won. You won that battle. 100%. Okay, let’s go back to the chat. The menu in Breakdance. I’ve seen videos of the menu in Breakdance. So I don’t even have to show you guys how to use the menu in Breakdance. I’ve seen videos I’ve seen enough of a video to say the build the menu builder in breakdance beats the menu builder in bricks objective hundred-percent fair honest everything that builder beats bricks is builder now bricks is working on a new menu builder don’t know they come out with a new menu builder maybe it beats breakdance at that point. I don’t know. But right now, the breakdance menu builder blows bricks out of the water. 100%. It’s just true. Factual. That’s reality. That’s the reality that we live in. There may be other one-off things that it does better. Wouldn’t even attempt to argue with it. Fine. But we just have to constantly go back to the core philosophy.

2:04:24
And by the way, well, no, I don’t know. I want oxygen to live. I want oxygen to live on and I want it to continue being good. So I’m not gonna say what I was about to say. Kevin is wild. We have quite a lot of Bricks users here. We should consider a vote for true global component right now. Yeah, somebody make that feature request and let’s share it around and let’s get it.

2:04:44
You know, I’ve done that in the past okay I’m guilty right I’ll create a feature request I’ll drop into the inner circle I’ll drop into the automatic CSS group and I’ll go hey guys we really need this feature and then they’ll all kind of flood the forum and now it has like you know 500 requests or whatever we can do that I mean we can do that it’s important it’s how we got some of the stuff that we have in bricks that we didn’t have before. I’ll tell you that right now. So good. Tyree says, the truth is hurting me, sir. It doesn’t have to hurt.

2:05:20
That’s the thing. The very first thing I said in the intro to Page Building 101 is, look, it doesn’t matter to me what builder you’re coming from. You’re gonna hear some stuff in this course. I’m not insulting your family members. Nobody is related to any of these builders, okay? Unless you made the builder, then I understand. But the users, I’m not insulting your family member. We’re just talking about page builders and professional workflows and doing professional work, professional standards, and we’re just all trying to do the best that we can.

2:05:48
Now, I’m not gonna allow you to argue with me that Elementor is like an amazing builder and it’s professional and all, like that’s nonsense. But I’m not insulting your family member. It’s like, you don’t have to take it personal. We’re just talking about page builders. 13 million websites, 8% of the internet is on Elementor. I know, I know. And dude, let me tell you, from a, I’m a business person. I’m a marketing person.

2:06:14
Like, I love, my brain thinks in business and marketing and everything. So I’m sitting, it’s actually like, it’s painful sometimes. Like it’s hard to go to sleep sometimes. It’s hard to sit at a party and somebody’s telling me about this concept and my brain just like goes off into like business land and marketing like trying to, oh, how can we do that? And you know, it’s like, I can’t shut it off.

2:06:41
And so, oh, hold on. Sunny says, Kevin, you should drink some water. All right, thank you, Sunny. Sunny is watching out, she’s keeping out. All right, so from a success standpoint, it is un-fricking-deniable. Elementor has absolutely crushed the game. Undeniable reality that we live in. They have absolutely crushed the game. They are used by a gazillion people.

2:07:08
And they have a ton of content creators creating content around their builder. It is what it is. Does that mean they’re the best? Does that mean we should also jump on board? No, no, I mean we all have independent thought and we’re able to think critically and we’re able to make better decisions. Keep in mind, it’s a lot of people who, here’s the general way that this happens a lot of times.

2:07:38
Somebody comes in and they’re like, I want to learn how to build websites. They download Elementor. They eventually upgrade to Elementor Pro. They eventually get confident enough to say, I would like to build websites for other people. Keep in mind, they don’t know anything about web design. They know the language of Elementor. And here’s the test. You take somebody, we said this earlier, take somebody who’s an expert at Elementor but it’s the only builder used, and drop them into Oxygen, drop them into Webflow, they will fricking drown in seconds.

2:08:11
You will watch them. That hand will go right underwater and they’re going straight to the bottom and there’ll be that meme. That meme, where’s that? I’m not gonna pull it up. But there’s that meme where the mom’s like with her kid in the pool and her other kid’s drowning off to the side and she doesn’t realize it and then the second part of the meme is a skeleton at the bottom of the pool.

2:08:32
That’s what they would be, that’s what they would be. They don’t know web design, they don’t know what they’re doing, they have no idea. They just know how to assemble things in a page builder called Elementor. And so, but here’s the big problem with that. They gain this confidence in Elementor and they start building client sites and they start making money building client sites and then they’ve labeled themselves a professional and then what they do is they go into other groups and they start giving advice and they start saying things like it doesn’t matter what page builder you use you can use any page builder you’re comfortable with da da da da da da da da da and they encourage other people to make these horror shows of of websites and it might look visually good, right? But clients are paying for more than visually good. They’re paying for accessibility. Even though they don’t even know they’re paying for accessibility, they should be paying for accessibility. You should be having that as the consultant. That should be part of your professional workflow, right? They should be paying for maintainability and scalability of the website. Things that we just harp on all the time over and over and over because these things are very very very important.

2:09:43
But no, Elementor sites don’t have any of these things. Elementor sites are a horror show. But we have professionals going, doesn’t matter what builder you use, you can use any builder you’re comfortable with. They don’t, this is a person that doesn’t know anything about web design. And yeah, they’ve sold sites, great. They’ve built a lot of sites, great. They know the language of a page builder called Elementor and if you put them in any other environment they will fricking drown.

2:10:08
They have no idea what they’re doing. So they should not be giving advice to other people saying, doesn’t matter what page builder, you can use any page builder. This is nonsense. We’re getting advice from, it’d be like me going into, you know, jujitsu and it’s like, oh, I can learn from, I do jujitsu, right? Been doing it for a very, very, very long time.

2:10:28
So I can go in and I can get advice from a multi-champion black belt who I can watch his videos, he’s fricking destroying people. I can learn from them, or I can learn from a dude that watched jujitsu videos on YouTube and chose a belt color to put around his waist and he can’t do jack shit. That’s the Elementor person that started on element or grew an element or only knows element or and and now is giving you advice trying to teach other people to get to off of YouTube videos. That’s come on, like, it’s a big deal. All right. The video says I think that’s your name. Dave, David, us, David us. Please do a pine grow first impressions. It’s on the list 100%.

2:11:12
All right. Kevin’s meme knowledge is pretty strong. I do like myself some memes. I saw the quickly review, I was wanting to hear a little follow up. He wasn’t able to find the SAS editor, which is a very cool feature. I’m gonna be doing a lot more with quickly. So guys, I showed you at the beginning of this live stream, automatic CSS working inside Gutenberg and working with generate inside of Gutenberg Quickly is right behind that so I haven’t officially started on integration with quickly, but absolutely, I want automatic CSS working with quickly and I want it working with generate too. So for those of you who are using generate I here’s the thing that’s stopping and generate we’re gonna switch gears for just a second.

2:12:03
If you are a generate press, generate blocks user, please help me out here. So I’m gonna go to generate. Here’s the one thing that is holding us back. So I’m gonna go to pages. Let’s go back to this grid that I made. Oh, I didn’t make the grid there. Okay, where did I make the grid? So was it services, edit? Okay, here you go, whatever.

2:12:23
So I want container right here. Oh, this is where I was using a global style. Okay, we can’t do that. See, here’s an example of, well, you got to go to the magic area to do your global styles. So I have to leave this workflow and go somewhere else. All right, so let’s go back. I’ll show you the area. So you go to generate blocks, global styles. Here’s the magic area. All your magic happens here. It’s a special area. All right so we’re gonna click on this container. I want to use variables right here. I have to be able to use variables. Do not make me pull numbers out of my ass. I want to use variables right here like var. I can’t even type them. It won’t even let me type them. The minute we have variables in these fields, you can do anything you want and generate with automatic CSS.

2:13:19
We have to have variables in these fields. So if you are a generate, generate blocks user, this can be the, and by the way, you should be requesting this anyway. This outside of ACSS, I don’t care. If you don’t use ACSS, fine. You should still want variables in all of these fields. Every input should be able to accept a variable and I emailed them and I you know I briefly spoke with them and we talked about it and it seemed like it’s a like it’s coming it’s it’s something they want to do but they were maybe initially only going to do it to certain fields it really needs to be in all fields so if you can ping them whatever whatever needs to happen right the I want it I want like I wanted in my hands tomorrow just like every user, right?

2:14:03
Go into the Brickster, when’s 1.8 coming out? It’s like the most popular question. But I want variables, like we all need variables, whether you’re an ACSS user or not, variables in all of these inputs needs to happen, whatever you guys need to do on, you know, requests, feature requests, forums, I don’t even know how it all works, but get the word out. We need variables in all of these fields, and then we are rocking and rolling.

2:14:27
So here’s an example of that component, right? Image, say I have to give it a label. Not a class, a label. Why did we change the name? Couldn’t tell you, no idea. But this is effectively like I’m giving it a class. So I gave this thing a class, gave this thing a class, gave this thing a class, they all have labels, right?

2:14:47
Then I can go out of the magic area, back into my pages that I was working on, and then I can, see, now I can use them, right? And I can put the card here, and then I can do whatever I want with it. But then if I want to change anything of the style, I believe I can override them on like a one-off basis. But if I want to change the global style, I’m fairly certain, because I’m not seeing the values here.

2:15:14
I’m fairly certain I have to go back to the magic area, and then I can make the changes over there. And that’s, I guess, what Breakdance is encouraging you to do as well. And I just think, I mean, can’t we all agree that that’s not a great workflow? If Breakdance has a class-first workflow and improved UI, then it would be a problem. But then again, there is oxygen. Yeah, it would be a problem for oxygen, right big problem for oxygen If breakdance adds a toggle to make classes first, then it’ll be fine. Yes, I Think so. Yeah, look I’m looking at the We didn’t inspect every element right there’s we could go in into more depth But from what I’ve seen so far, I mean it gives you the right fundamental elements It has a great menu builder. It’s got the headers. It’s got the footers, it’s got custom templates for custom post types, custom post type support, dynamic data support, it’s got loops, it’s got an advanced query builder.

2:16:09
It’s like I’m going down checking the things off and then the only thing it doesn’t have is a class first workflow. And if they added a class first workflow and I could disable all these nonsense elements, okay, like we talked about before. So this is breakdance, right? So it’s edit and breakdance What I would like to see is I can disable every right? Well, this is go down the box icon box gone disable image box disable basic list disable checkmark list disable I mean, this is like Okay, but like now this is not That bricks does a very similar thing. I I don’t I don’t mess with this stuff Just gone. Don’t need it.

2:16:52
Too limited, these are all too limited. They create tons of limitations. Stats grid, oh, don’t need that. And guys, these things are so easy to build, my gosh. And if you’re a frames user, these things are already built. But the big difference is, they’re built with BIM classes, so they’re built correctly and they’re accessible and they’re on the you can do an unlimited amount of things that you can put other elements in them you can do whatever you want right so they’re a starting point these things are not a starting point they’re an ending point they you can’t expand them beyond that like I can add other stats to this I’m sure right yeah this would be expected right but the minute I need to add an element in this stat card, I don’t think that’s possible.

2:17:43
Right? So it’s tremendously limiting. If I built this stat card by myself, which would take approximately 8.7 seconds, I would be able to have an unlimited stat card that I can put anything into it that I wanted. Open Bricks gallery element, add some images and inspect code. All right, we might be able to do that in a minute. Let’s keep going down the list. Star rating.

2:18:08
I have this element built with CSS, but this is an example where, I mean, if you could, I guess you have a label. Yeah, right there, label text. Okay, you can keep that element. That’s a good helper element, I think. There’s not a lot you would need to add to that as long as it’s um, you know accessible So then we go down fancy divider I Never advocate. This is a Somebody told me the other day use the element or spacer element. Oh my god I never in my life would I ever expect anybody or advocate for anybody using a physical Spacer element and then I watched a whole element or tutorial on How to space things out or something and they were using these spacer elements everywhere. My gosh Talk about like worst practice on earth, but same thing with a fancy divider You don’t really want these things to be physical HTML elements. These things should almost always be pseudo elements All right, so let’s add this Countdown timer.

2:19:07
This is important because what did I say? PHP or JavaScript functionality is added, then it can be a lot more helpful. Tabs, yes, we need tabs for sure. Slider, need that for sure. But a lot of these just don’t need to exist. Social icons doesn’t need to exist. Let’s add this real quick. Let’s do a little test. Here you go. This is a very quick, easy test.

2:19:29
Let’s see if breakdance, and I’m telling you, I don’t care if breakdance passes or fails right now if they pass this test Amazing more power to them. Here we go So we’re linking to Facebook type is Facebook social network. Okay, this is point this out I’m gonna go through these real quick before we get there. Just I’m guessing I’m creating a guess Advanced not. Oh, no, that’s that’s not going to get the job done It would have to be on the individual element type Link that’s dynamic data. Okay. I think it’s going to fail. So I’m going to go to the front end Tab tab tab Okay, select it with the keyboard, let’s see how it announces right Oh Voice over voice over off. Hang on. Hang on. Hang on.

2:20:28
I gotta switch my, how do I get you guys to be able to hear this? It’s coming through the wrong speakers. Let’s go window, window, window, window, window. Where are we? Oh, here we go. I think I can switch it here. Mix minus, okay. Maybe cover your ears just slightly. Cover your ears just slightly because this might be a little loud. I don’t know turn your volume down just a little bit But where is it come on Voice over on now, it’s turning on voiceover, but I don’t hear anything Hold on. It’s on the mixer. It’s one of these Hang tight. Let’s see if we get it Mm-hmm. There we go.

2:21:05
Toolbar, navigation, list eight items. Menu pop-up link, about WordPress. Menu pop-up, visited link. Breakdance link, customize link. One up menu, li-li-li-li-visit sir. Menu pop-up link, visited link. Image, https://www.facebook.com/. Link image, https://twitter.com/. You are currently on a link inside of Web Content. content to click voiceover off.

2:21:29
Okay. So why did we get the Kevin Hart? Kevin Hart had to come out because it’s a, it’s a, here’s a, here’s a helper component, right? Hey, that’s so helpful. Look how quick I added the social icons to the site. But then we realize, um, there’s no zero accessibility, right? Uh, it didn’t even say Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. It’s reading the literal URL. What it should say is, follow us on Facebook.

2:22:10
Follow us on Twitter. So if you care about accessibility, which is very important, and professionals should absolutely care about accessibility, this is how it should, and what was I looking for? I was looking for ARIA labels. I was looking for the capability of having hidden screen reader text because this is how we build these components, right?

2:22:31
In frames, if you go do the same test that I just did in frames on the social component that we built, you’ll get the correct announcement and you can customize the announcement. And so this, I see the add attribute right here. I can add an ARIA label right here. The problem is I’m adding the ARIA label almost certainly to the wrapper of all of these and not to each individual one Every single one of them needs an ARIA label or I need the ability to add a text label that I can then hide From visual users to announce these properly. There’s no you can’t add any Accessible context to these whatsoever. So I added it to save time, but then I come to find I’ve got to delete it and I got to build it myself anyway Because it just it wasn’t right from the beginning and you’ll just but who I mean who knows this right?

2:23:22
Beginners to beginners know to even look for that Intermediate do they even know to look for that no But those are the people who are going to tell you that there’s nothing wrong with this builder or that builder or this element Or that oh, you know everybody has their opinion But I think once we get on a live stream and look at reality in the face, all together, we can cut all of the nonsense and all of the crap and all of the talking. Everybody likes to run their mouth, but we can get on a live stream and we can just see reality. We can all see it together, right?

2:23:52
Then we can start to see, oh, okay, there’s some objective reality in these arguments here. And you’ll find this across so many elements. Is this fixable? 100%, they could fix that tomorrow. And then what I just said would no longer be true. But you know what will always be true? When I build my own social icons, they’ll always be right, right from the beginning. And I won’t have to worry about anything else.

2:24:18
This is just HTML. It’s not PHP, it’s not JavaScript, it’s not magic, it’s not nothing else is happening here. So it doesn’t need to be a really a pre-made element unless we know 100% there is a commitment where they’ve said like we did with frames. When we built frames, we said you can safely add these elements because you know that they’re going to follow best practices. There are going to have BIM classes attached to them. It’s this and this and this like we’re going to do it the right way. It’s going to be better than if you had built it from scratch.

2:24:43
That’s our goal with frames, right? So if a builder commits to that, then I have no problem with it. But the problem is I continuously open elements and inspect them, and they don’t live up to the standard, right? And again, I’m not saying it to put it down. I’m just, I have to communicate objective reality. I don’t know how to sprinkle sugar on it. Like, other people could say this nicer than I can. I’m sure.

2:25:13
It’s just, this is how I know to say it. So it’s how I’m pointing it out. And it does kind of does irk me when people who are obviously like beginners or intermediate or they’ve never used a different page. Try to argue with me about this. I’ve been doing it for 20 years, okay. I can do things outside of all the page builders. So I’ve got somebody that’s only ever used Element or doesn’t really know what they’re talking about trying to argue with me about how you don’t need classes and stuff like this is it’s kind of it’s like becomes a clown show at some point all right so that’s that do you see I mean we added an element remember the saves time right but it ends up not being being done right and granted like I will give them so much benefit of the doubt this is version 1.2 I’m I’m not suggesting it should be perfect.

2:26:04
I’m not suggesting that there’s not errors, that there’s, oh God, there’s a bug. I found a bug, it’s terrible. Nobody should use, that’s not what we’re doing here. We’re talking about fundamental stuff. Breakdance, like I said, could fix that tomorrow. You know what? I don’t have a problem with Breakdance failing that test, as long as they’re committed to fixing it. It’s the builders who just don’t seem to care, right?

2:26:29
How long has Divian Elementor been around? How many millions of dollars do these companies have? And they don’t fix shit. They don’t fix the stuff that actually matters. They keep trying to suggest, oh no, we just need more beginners, get more Bunko Club websites built. That’s what we need to focus on. They’re not professional builders built for professional people.

2:26:50
This is the reality. It is Wix for WordPress. Elementor is Wix for WordPress. Now, if Breakdance is like, we are not going to do what Elementor is, we’re not going to treat the internet like that. We’re going to fix elements like that, that you just saw fail. If they have that commitment, I can 100% get behind that.

2:27:13
I will 100%, we need more builders that pay attention to details, right? More builders that care about standards. That would be fantastic. I can absolutely get behind that. So I’m not going to, you know, show you an element failing and then laugh at them. Ha ha ha, it failed. I got it to fail. That’s not what we’re doing here. We’re just pointing out objective reality of like that kind of needs to happen. And if they make it happen, like more power to them.

2:27:42
I love it. I absolutely love it. But again, we have to go back to the philosophical differences of rejecting a class first workflow. That’s going to be the biggest hurdle. All right. Where are we at? Two and a half hours. Lots of people still here. I’m just going to go on to questions now. We’ve gone through all of the elements. I mean, I could keep going but like table of contents is very helpful. I’ll let questions come in. If you have questions, we’re going to move on to questions. So question in all caps, and drop drop your question in. I’m going to keep going through this for a minute.

2:28:26
Somebody said to add an image gallery. The problem is, I don’t have a lot of images. I think I only have one image on this site. I don’t even see a gallery. Comparison, hover card, image with zoom, scrolling image, featured image. I don’t know. I don’t know where the gallery is. You got to help me out. From a financial perspective they are happy to sell tens of thousands of single site licenses than a few hundred developer ones. Okay, good. Thank you for bringing this up. We can address it yet again.

2:29:04
You can sell millions of copies of a advanced professional builder and I’ll prove it to you. Well, let’s go right here. And I know people don’t like this, this, this fact, this reality that we all live in. Should I put a red box around it? How many boxes do I need to put around it? Do you guys see that? There it is. Look, there’s the objective reality that we all live in. Okay. Oh, they don’t want to, they want to make money.

2:29:38
That’s why they have to do this. Webflow didn’t do it. Webflow didn’t say our users are morons so we can’t give them classes. We got to dumb everything down for them. We got to box them in to pre-made elements. That’s not what Webflow said. 4 billion ain’t small. In any reality that I’ve ever lived in, Webflow has the best grid builder of any page builder. Webflow has the best global components of any page builder. Designers that have never built a website in their life, they’re just good at Figma. There’s a whole community in Webflow of designers who had no development experience whatsoever and they build websites in Webflow all day long.

2:30:56
They had zero experience. The difference, you wanna know what the difference is? You wanna know why I’m committed to education? It’s no secret or it shouldn’t be a secret. It’s not a coincidence, I should say. It’s no coincidence that web flow also has some of the best training on how to build websites in a page builder How to build websites with web flow they committed they said we don’t think people are stupid we think they just need to be taught and So they built a builder that is a professional builder And then they taught people how to use it and this is what happened.

2:31:43
You can’t tell me you can’t make money doing it the right way. We live in a reality where it has been proven that you can. Okay. So thank you for bringing that up. All right. Question, is there a future for ACSS support for breakdance even without class editor upfront? Sure, I’m not going to rule it out. I am not going to, well, I mean, let’s talk about how it would work. You have to be able to add classes to things relatively quickly. They’ve kind of buried the classes box.

2:32:34
So, it takes a few extra clicks to get there, but you can absolutely, I mean, you saw I create a utility class for a three-column grid. I added it to the thing, I got the grid, okay? So, it’s not the best workflow. You can create your own classes, which is good. You could use Vim if you wanted to. So, that’s good. You can use variables in the input fields. You could build a site with automatic CSS and breakdance. I mean, you could probably install automatic CSS right now and see a lot of the stuff that it will work with.

2:33:04
Some of the stuff is gonna require some special overrides and things like that. So, you know, we would have to do some work to make it compatible. I would feel way more comfortable making automatic CSS compatible with breakdance than I ever would making it compatible with Elementor or Divi. I’ll tell you that right now. ACSS could be made with, there’s nothing stopping us from building ACSS for Elementor and selling a gazillion copies of it.

2:33:28
I just refuse to do it. One, it would be an absolute nightmare. Elementor doesn’t even put classes on the right DOM elements. You add a class to a heading, it doesn’t add it to the heading. It adds it to a wrapper three levels up. It’s fricking ridiculous. I can’t even talk, my blood pressure goes up when Elementor is even mentioned, and people try to pretend, pretend that there’s anything legitimate about it.

2:33:51
It’s just what I think. And it plays out, when you really get into inspecting stuff, it would just be a nightmare to make ACSS compatible, but we’d make a lot of money. We would, but I refuse to do it. I’m not gonna do it. But Breakdance, I don’t have that same reaction to doing it with Breakdance. Now, it’s very possible that, you know, Louis decides, oh, well, we’re not gonna allow automatic CSS and, you know, I don’t know what he could do, but I don’t know.

2:34:25
But I’m not gonna be like, oh, you know, I’ve got a beef with Louis. I do what our users need to have happen. And so if we get enough users that are like, dude, I know what you say about class first workflow, but I’m just gonna do my thing and I really want ACSS and Breakdance, and there’s enough of those people, then for sure, we can make it happen. It’s not like I don’t recommend that people use Quikly, but we’re gonna make it compatible with Quikly.

2:35:00
So it’s, you know, if a page builder is not making it an absolute nightmare, then, you know, we’ll consider it. I guess that was a long way of saying I’m not ruling it out. Could you show how Bricks is different from Oxygen regarding class selecting, editing, organizing for an element, or point me to an older comparison if I missed it? So let me get this off the screen. I mean, I can just tell you, I don’t have to show you.

2:35:30
They’re almost identical in class workflow. You can add classes at the same speed in Oxygen that you can add them in Brics. Brics has the one significant advantage. Both, neither of them really have a great class organization system. Brics is working on one. Oxygen lets you put classes in folders. It’s still not fantastic. Oxygen supports chained selectors or like what I would call advanced selectors, maybe a little bit better than Bricks.

2:36:05
But those are so rarely used, and I don’t use the interface for doing that. I would just always just write the CSS really fast. So that’s not really an argument worth going down. The one thing Bricks absolutely hands down beats Oxygen in is the ability to rename a class. So what Bricks actually does with classes is it assigns a hidden ID to the class in the backend. And so that class has a name that is superficial. The name could be, you could swap that name a gazillion times.

2:36:43
The styles are actually linked to a hidden ID of that class, right? So if I create a class in Bricks and I’m like, ah shit, I made a typo, right? Which happens to me all the time. I’ll create a class on accident, I’ll have a typo. Well in Oxygen, you gotta go find that in the classes library and you gotta delete it, yada, yada, yada. In Bricks, you can just hit edit and rename the class and fix the typo.

2:37:06
If you decide, if you’re using BIM and you create a BIM style component, right, and you misnamed something, you decide, ah shit, that name’s not very good. I want a better name for that thing. You don’t have to delete that class, create a new class, reassign all the styles, you just edit the name and you’re done. And you can’t do that in Oxygen. So that is one big advantage in Brics.

2:37:30
In Brics you can also delete classes from the database without going to a different area. Like Oxygen has a class manager. I don’t, I should probably shouldn’t say that 100%. I don’t. It’s been a while since I’ve used oxygen on an actual site. So maybe they added the ability to quickly delete a class now. But the general workflow, I mean, 90% of it other than renaming classes, they’re almost identical. Which by the way, is why you don’t have to learn bricks. Like if you know web design, and you’ve been using oxygen, you can switch to bricks like that. If you’ve been using bricks and you decide, oh, I just like, I really like Elijah.

2:38:07
And you’re like, I would rather use oxygen. Then you can switch from bricks to oxygen like that. It’s like they both use the exact same philosophy, the exact same workflow, the exact same language for everything. And that’s why I try to teach the language of web design and not the language of a page builder. Because I believe we’re gonna move into an era where people snap out of this ridiculous fantasy land that they’re in, that all these other page builders are in, and they realize, oh, there’s actually a right way to do this, and it’s kind of the way that it was designed to work.

2:38:41
There’s a lot of people working on CSS that I think would agree, you should probably be using classes to build your websites. There’s a lot of people who work on the HTML standards who would probably agree that semantic HTML is important. And so, it’s not just, it’s not like, oh, it’s what Kevin said, he’s like the only one with the opinion, come on. It’s like I always say, we’re all living in a reality, and when we get on a live stream, we can all see that reality together.

2:39:10
That’s what I love about live streams. Okay. What about the automatic CSS FSE theme from the start of the stream? Oh, did you see that? Was that slipped? Where were we? I don’t think I have it open. Let me open. Oh, is that what you saw right there? Little something, something cooking.

2:39:41
Well, something, something cooking in the back end in the kitchen. It’s okay. We don’t need to talk too much about that right now. There’s always something cooking in the kitchen. I will tell you that right now. There is always something cooking in the kitchen. You don’t have to worry about that. All right, let’s go. Question question. So, I love the double.

2:40:06
I love the double. So, a breakdance ads, okay, we already answered that one. Would frames be available for generate and or quickly if they are ACSS compatible? Really good question. Look, I try to be the most transparent, like, you know, how many other developers get on live streams and just show you back ends and show you sneak peeks and just talk openly about, like, I really enjoy one, I like the questions too. I just really enjoy sharing philosophy.

2:40:41
And I feel that we, that we do that. We try our absolute best day in and day out to do things the right way and do right by every single user and customer that we have. I think being as open and transparent is part of that. So I will answer honestly with this question of, I got to put it back on the screen, whether frames would be available for generate or quickly. The amount of work required to create frames is probably whatever you would imagine it takes, you could probably multiply that by 10 or 20. And to think of like taking that work into another builder, it’s not a small task.

2:41:25
It’s not, it is not a small task. And then you have to ask, why do these products have subscriptions and not LTDs? Well, if you saw the ongoing workload, I think you would understand Now there is an LTD for frames. It’s temporary because frames is still Much newer than ACSS, etc But it is it is It is a ton of work. It is honestly a ton of work and so when we create to create ACSS compatibility with Gutenberg, we are naturally faced with a question.

2:42:05
The question is, do we build frames for generate and then try to build frames for quickly and have frames for bricks? And maybe there’s a frames for oxygen. I mean, we could do that. Or we could build our own basic components for Gutenberg, like a section, a container, a div, a heading, an image. All of the basic building blocks that you need. Not all the fancy shit that nobody really needs, right? That we already discussed, those kinds of elements. Of course, Frames has an accordion, Frames has a carousel, Frames is going to have a menu builder, Frames is going to have a lot of things, a lot of very nice accessible components.

2:42:53
But the question we’re faced with is, do we do we take all the time and energy and create a generate version of frames, and then create a quickly version of frames, both of these existing Gutenberg, or do we build our own components and build frames for Gutenberg just as a native thing. And so you can go in and you can add frames natively, and it all works seamlessly with automatic CSS, and then you can iterate on those, you can add elements to anything you want to add an element to, you’re not locked in, everything’s got BIM classes already assigned to it, so your workflow is, guys, people who use frames are building websites in like half the time.

2:43:33
Like it’s that, and we are, we built it initially for our agency. Like, that’s the other thing you gotta think about, right? There’s page builder developers, and there’s plugin developers, and framework developers, and a lot of these people don’t actually build websites for clients, right? So, some of the stuff they do is theory, some of the stuff they do, you know, with workflow efficiency and stuff like this, like, well, we think this is the best way to do it.

2:43:58
But they’re not in there day in and day out building client sites a lot of times. Some of them are, some of them are. But like for frames, we built frames because we needed it for our agency. And we’re like, dude, if we build this the right way, we’re gonna be building websites in half the time and they’re gonna be built to better standards. Like, this is cool. And so we built it and then sold it to everybody else who also wanted it.

2:44:21
Or we really sold the concept of it and then we built it. So I would just say, look, it doesn’t really make sense for us to build frames for generate or frames for quickly It makes the most sense to build frames for Gutenberg Potentially with an FSE theme and then that’s it and then at that point you don’t really need the others But you know, that’s neither here nor there What would it take for you to return to oxygen follow up and produce the same level of helpful content before your ideological departure? I would make Trent fully transparent I would start making content for oxygen again and I would make frames for oxygen if I wasn’t so worried about breakdances encroachment on oxygen.

2:45:16
I told you guys that in the beginning. If there’s one thing I see cutting the knees out from oxygen, it is Breakdance. So every time a feature comes out, I was so close to telling the team that we’re gonna build Frame for Oxygen. So close. And then another feature release comes out from Breakdance and it’s like, hey, we got an advanced query builder now. Hey, grid’s coming.

2:45:43
Hey, this, all the things that was never gonna happen. And then I see like, oh, I cannot invest the time and money and effort into building frames for oxygen when this thing is sitting here about to cut it at the knees. Like, nothing is gonna happen, but I’m just weighing like, that feels risky. God, that feels risky, right? So it’s uncertainty.

2:46:12
So if the uncertainty wasn’t there, then I would do it like that. But there’s uncertainty. And so I just can’t invest that amount of money in time. Because you also have to remember, it’s not just building frames for these things. Every additional frame that we come up with has to then be built for oxygen, has to then be built for bricks, has to then be built for generate, has to then be built for quickly, has to then be, you get it? So the more things we build frames for, it’s an exponential level of support, not just in building new frames, but always going back and improving or adjusting old frames.

2:46:54
You find one issue with a frame, you gotta fix that issue in four different builders or environments or whatever it is. Guys, it’s an astronomical amount of work. So, all right, let’s keep going. I’ve got about 10 more minutes than we’re at the three hour mark. And I, you know, that’s, that’s who is the, who’s the comedian, Nate Bargett see, that’s as much as I can talk about this.

2:47:26
I wish I could plug in like memes dynamically. That would be, that would be fantastic. All right, we have some good questions. I got to find them. Everybody’s talking to themselves in the chat or talking to other people. A lot of side conversations. Win-win, Kevin’s success is directly related to ours. At the end of the day, maybe you’re a better professional and he’s a little richer for his efforts. Yeah, I mean, look, that’s the difference, right?

2:47:52
Elementor gets rich having people build dumpster fires, my goal is to make money while everybody improves their standards and workflow and everything else. And I mean, like, I built Automatic CSS because that’s the framework I needed for my own agency and my own workflow. Because it legit, it’s not like, oh, I don’t build sites for clients, I’m going to come up with this concept and then I’m just going to sell it to everybody.

2:48:24
It’s like, it was built to save time and make things efficient and make things more standardized. So then those are the selling points I use. And people are like, oh, he’s just telling you that because he wants to make money. They’re like, I built it because those are the things I needed it to do. Same thing with frames. So of course, those are the selling points. Like, it’s how I sold myself on building it in the first place. It’s like, I could understand if like, I didn’t have an agency and was just building these things out of thin air going, and this is really what some page builders are doing with the presets thing.

2:48:57
I ask myself all the time, do they actually build websites for clients? Because why are they trying to switch up the work? Why are they selling everybody on this new workflow that has all these limitations? Shouldn’t we be selling people on a workflow that actually makes things faster and easier and more efficient and more standardized and in alignment with best practices, we get a lot of haters.

2:49:20
And I just don’t know how you can hate on like, adherence to best practices. It’s such an odd thing to me. Okay, we talked about the FSE theme. So breakdance ad, okay, yada, yada, yada. All right, I’m looking for other questions. Don’t start Kevin on LTDs, he’ll blow his stack. Just bill your clients to cover their tiny costs. I mean, that’s a good point, Yeti. This is a fantastic point.

2:49:47
Look, automatic CSS should not cost you any, it doesn’t cost you anything. It’s not a cost. Like if you are an agency owner or a freelancer, all you have to do is price your products, your services correctly. And none of these tools cost you any money. You know how many tools I have? You know how many subscriptions I have? My clients pay all of the subscriptions.

2:50:23
It’s called a website management fee. Now, some people just call it a hosting fee. It’s not, we’re in a modern age, okay? We’re not just hosting websites anymore. You charge your clients a nominal management fee. It’s not even that expensive. The volume of clients you have, because you think about it, come on guys. $99 a year, $149 a year, $79 a month from one client for a management fee. How many of those do I need before I’ve covered the $99 for a year?

2:51:02
Not a lot. Now you’re going to have 10, what even if you had 10 subscriptions? I mean the only people complaining are the people with like three clients or five clients. I mean, honestly, at five clients, you’d probably be breaking even at least if you’re, like, it’s a non-issue. For any, like, actual professional, it’s a non-issue. And you see this, like, I’ve done work with, I’ve done work with $50 million companies. Do you guys want to know what they pay for their fricking CRM?

2:51:36
Dude, it’s like thousands of dollars a month just for their CRM at that level. They don’t even blink a fricking eye. If you charge appropriately and you’re actually getting clients, none of these little costs for these plugins are any issue whatsoever. Now that’s for people in developed economies. Let me put on my compassion hat, okay? If you’re in an area where clients don’t have a lot of money because the economy sucks, or it’s a developing country or whatever, I 100% get it, 100% get it. You can make the argument all day long, but don’t come at me from the fricking UK, or the US, or Germany, or anywhere else being like, oh, you know, these are just too costly.

2:52:27
My clients can’t afford these plugins. You’re just not pricing correctly. And you’re not, I guess there’s like a, there’s a confidence gap, there’s a sales gap, there’s a bunch of gaps. By the way, I’m in a mastermind. People from Germany, people from the UK, people from Australia, they don’t have these problems. Okay, they charge the management fees, it covers it. And like, so I just, I don’t want to hear like the nonsense excuse.

2:52:55
It’s the same type of thing. Make it make sense. I say that all the time. Make it make sense. Doesn’t some of these arguments, they just don’t make sense. I have five clients. Um, how much do you charge for the management fee? It starts at $79 a month. There’s different levels, depending on what the person wants, needs, et cetera.

2:53:11
But about $79 a month. It’s really not that much. Okay. Section name, answer your question in the section of your web layout container. Okay, you guys are having side conversations. I have to admit the automatic CSS FSE theme with a CSS plus frames would be a killer in Gutenberg if it gets a better navigator and a better class workflow so the elements that were Planning would have class boxes front and center Obviously right obviously So it would it would fix that problem because yes Gutenberg does hide the classes box under the advanced panel Unexplainable stuff.

2:53:46
What I don’t think we can fix, because we’re not going to do a whole builder interface. We’re not going to do like what Quickly did. This is not going to happen. We would do something in a totally different direction if that’s the level we were going to have to go to. So we can’t fix certain things like the magical disappearing list view in Gutenberg. I love, like one of my favorite features of Gutenberg is that you can literally tell the list always be visible and then it disappears Anytime you add an element and then click back out your list view is gone Even though you’ve told it to always be visible. What are my favorite features of Gutenberg?

2:54:37
We can’t overcome stuff like that. Unfortunately, it’s just It’s like if you decide to use Gutenberg, you’re gonna have to put up with some of the dumpster fire that comes with it Okay with it. Okay. See, Brandon says have to agree with you on ACSS huge time saver fun to work with you. Okay, we appreciate you Darwin. Thank you. All right. I think we’re at the three hour mark. Well, I’ve got five minutes I committed I committed to three hours. So we’ve got five more minutes. Can you imagine ChatGPT building a website using ACSS and Frames as you are creating some standards, it should be easy for ChatGPT to use these standards for a website build.

2:55:25
I’ll be 100% honest with you right now, you could just build it faster with Frames than trying to talk to ChatGPT and get it to do what the hell you want it to do. Frames is, it’s like, it doesn’t really get easier. The hardest part of frames is browsing the library and deciding which layouts you want and what order you want them to be in. That’s literally the hardest part. Once you’ve decided on that, I mean, you’re more or less done.

2:55:51
Like, I can’t imagine myself sitting there trying to convince ChatGPT to add certain things in the right… Like, that just seems like a lot of work. It’s literally point and click in bricks. This is not the first time I’ve heard this. I like when Kevin emphasized the point he has a future in being a church pastor once his web design days are over. Somebody said, it was Kyle from Admin Bar two weeks ago, said I sound like a Baptist preacher.

2:56:18
I don’t know, it’s just the way I talk. It’s… We did have some really good questions today. All right. I’m not going to keep scrolling up all the way through. Final thoughts with Breakdance or Bricks. I mean, in what capacity? So ultimately, Breakdance is not and I mean I think you guys knew I wasn’t going to come on here and be like Breakdance is a terrible builder it’s there’s a shitty developer to start like this is not maybe some of you more thought that was going to happen or were hoping that was going to happen but it’s not how this works. Breakdance, Lewis is a good developer. Elijah is a good developer.

2:57:16
These are good developers. Breakdance is a great page builder. It just doesn’t share my philosophy. But when I say my philosophy, what I actually mean is it doesn’t share the philosophy of web design. Like as every professional knows it to be. It creates a different philosophy. And like I said from the very beginning, you have to decide which camp you’re going to be in.

2:57:39
But I’m not going to knock like the like, it’s, it’s a great page builder. And I already said, if we’re comparing elements or to break dance, I would choose break dance every single day of the week. Okay. So that’s probably my final thoughts right there. Lewis is really about specific things he said related to content creators, related to the Oxygen community, related to Oxygen LTD holders. These are bothersome. But I’m not going to be bothered by those things and then try to come on and say that he’s not a good developer or that he hasn’t built a good tool or a good page builder or anything else.

2:58:27
The first thing I told you was I’m not petty. I don’t like, like drama just for the sake of drama, I have too much work to do. I have zero interest in that shit. What is the process when I bring in certain frames and then delete the frame to choose another one? So this is a good question. It depends on if you’ve styled anything yet. So if you style the classes, well, let me see if I can get your question.

2:58:50
Delete the frame and then choose another one. Okay, well that’s easy. I mean, if you like import a frame, you’re like, oh, I don’t wanna use that one. Let me delete it and use a different one instead. You just delete it. Now the classes, the BEM classes attached to it are gonna be imported, right, into the database, but they won’t have any styling attached to them. So really, it’s, you know, there’s not, it’s not like you’re adding a bunch of bloat or anything like that.

2:59:17
But you can easily just go up into the Bricks class box and you can just go delete, delete, delete, delete, delete and just delete those classes that came with it. If you want to, you don’t even have to. But if you want to do that, it takes a few seconds. And then you can import the frame that you want. But I have talked to Thomas and I guess it’s in theory right now, I can’t promise anything, but he did have a lot of interest in building a class and in fact I think it’s on their roadmap a class manager but part of that class manager would be a remote templates feature where when you click to import a frame for example it would ask you do you want a fresh copy of this frame or do you want to use the frame this version of the frame that you’ve already styled.

3:00:04
And that would allow you to say, oh, I want to use the frame I’ve already styled and bam, it adds it and it looks exactly the way you wanted it to look based on how you styled the classes. Or you could say, I want a fresh copy. And then it gives you a completely fresh copy of that frame if you want to create a completely different component, but with the same basic layout.

3:00:21
Are there any more WooCommerce frames coming? Yes, absolutely. There’s WooCommerce frames coming, WooCommerce single elements coming, WooCommerce whole templates coming, bunch of stuff coming in WooCommerce for frames. Quickly query loops, does it match their powerful query editor? Yeah, I didn’t find any issue with loops inside of quickly. Nothing about petty supporting Tom and Bricks is a better moral choice 100%.

3:01:03
Okay, question, if you have to choose what’s your main builder today, which one do you choose? Is that a question for me? I mean, I already chose Bricks. Now, that’s not to say like, you know, I was with Oxygen for a very long time. Nobody knows what’s gonna happen with any page builder. But right now, right now it’s Bricks. What’s the future of Bricks from your perspective in regards to Breakdance Oxygen?

3:01:27
I don’t think there is a comparison to Breakdance. I mean, unless Breakdance gets a class first workflow. That’s the only thing, then of course, it would threaten oxygen as we talked about. But Bricks is not threatened by Breakdance. That’s just, I don’t see that threat. I think Bricks has a phenomenal development team, and I think it’s gonna continue to get better and better and better. I think they have their head on straight, so to speak, right?

3:01:54
They’re not doing Elementor type things. I think they have their head on straight, so to speak, right? They’re not doing Elementor type things. So the future of BRICS is very, very bright. The future of oxygen depends on what happens with Breakdance, we’ve already talked about that. I’ll be applying for one of your live reviews with a website, I was working with frames, I want your overall and honest opinion on what I’ve done. No problem.

3:02:31
Yeah, normally what we do here on Web Design for Domies is we do live in-depth web design critiques. And so if you, there’s a link in the description of this video and you can submit a website to be critiqued if you would like. All right guys, that is it for today. I mean, I love you, I wanna continue hanging out with you. I do have some work to do. Will there be a frames for SureCart? No, because SureCart’s not a builder.

3:02:55
So it kind of is, it’s like, you know, they leverage the Gutenberg environment for doing a lot of stuff. So when automatic CSS works in Gutenberg and maybe when, you know, frames has some Gutenberg blocks and things, you would be able to use those when doing SureCart things. But SureCart has a lot of predetermined kind of components that you would use for that. So it wouldn’t be like a full version of frames or anything like that. Alright guys, peace. I’m out. I love you. Thank you for showing up today and I will be back next week with another episode. Cheers!