View is better than preview

React Bricks is the first headless CMS for Content creators. Simple visual editing like Word or Pages. Just React for Devs.

React Bricks Demo

April 14, 2023

Why visual editing?

Visual editing is the most natural interface for content creators: it's the interface we use to edit a document in Word or Pages. Developers are used to edit code in one place and see the result in another one, but marketing people and content creators don't like that friction.

Headless CMSs where created mainly to make the developers' life easier, but with headless CMSs we lost the visual editing of content that we had with a blank WordPress page, replacing it with ugly gray forms. And we lost the clean and simple concept of "Page", too: we take it back!

What about Wix or Webflow?

On the other end, tools like Wix or Webflow have a great user experience, but they have many other pitfalls that make them unusable for corporate websites:

• Not flexible: tools like Wix, which tend to be very easy to use, are not flexible regarding the design system, so that you cannot reproduce the exact corporate design system, but you need to choose one of the proposed templates. Great for a freelancer project, no go for corporate.

• Complex: More advanced tools like WebFlow are very flexible, but they tend to be complex to use, because the content creator is supposed to know what a margin or a padding are.

• Too flexible: What's more, it's not the content creator business to create the design and tweak the CSS parameters. For a corporate website, the design system is created by the designers together with the developers and nobody should be able to break the design system. We want to be sure we won't have green text on red background! :)

React Bricks approach

React Bricks has the advantages of both a Headless CMS and a No-code side builder.
 We know that a corporate website must start with code and we also know that the best user experience for a content creator is visual editing.

> Code to developers

Developers create content blocks with code as React components, never leaving the code editor. React Bricks adds the visual editing magic.
It works with any React framework, with starters for Next.js, Gatsby and Remix, which help creating a blazing fast website.
It works with any CSS framework and you can host it where you like.
 Read how React Bricks works with React!

> Visual UX to Content creators!

Content creators have a point and click interface:

• They directly edit text and images, just clicking on the text and writing, as you do in Word or Pages and clicking on images, uploading and cropping (with set constraints).

• They can change properties like background color etc., but only the properties that the developers chose to be editable and with the values that are allowed, with validation rules.

In this way, content creators have all the freedom they want and no more than they need. Good constraints guide their work without limiting them.

And that is much more inspiring than grey forms, right?