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I just recently started a wordpress website for a friedn & while I have experience creating fully custom themes/plugins I realised after a couple of days of coding the theme a page builder would make much more sense in terms of letting them change things themselves?
I need full customisation of everything for woocommerce, the designs are currently in figma.
Originally I looked at oxygen & it looks really promising, is it still viable considering breakdance as an alternative? Also with elementor, is it possible to completely customise all woocommerce features?
Thanks for any help🙏
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If you already know how to make custom themes and plugins then learning how to do FSE block themes is better. Gutenberg (not the plugin) is the default editor. It works similarly to page builders and can be extended with block plugins.
Haven’t used Oxygen or Breakdance so I can’t speak to those. I do not like Elementor. Others here can chime in on these.
For some low budget sites I use elementor, mainly because it feels more full-featured and more intuitive than gutenberg. But – on sites with budget (and need) for custom coding, I prefer gutenberg. The site speed is just far far better than any pagebuilder.
Kadence Theme probably has more WC control than any other theme – and includes blocks… or you can use Spektra, Greenshift, or some other blocks plugin to make pages.
If you go FSE then Bricksy or Blockpress are good, and you have a lot of control – but you’ll have to do a fair bit of work to make the WC templates. Something like ACF might help here.
Oxygen is still viable, but there is a newer builder (Breakdance) from the same SW house – so there’s questions about its ongoing development.
Breakdance is extremely good – with a fair amount of custom WC stuff and an exceptional builder. Bricks is similar – with less high-end tricks, but an excellent page-builder. They are both very friendly to coders who want an easy way to throw templates together and visually build pages – while keeping easy and flexible ways to add custom code. They also have conditional content, so a lot of code jobs can be done visually too.
Elementor is utter shat… I just looked at a post asking for help. The element they wanted to get CSS for was about 100 nested DIVS deep, on a page with 40 stylesheets and about 12 JS libraries. It’s just appalling garbage. The same page on Bricks or BD would have about 5-10 Divs nested max and about 5% of the page weight.
Elementor lovers will tell you it can be made fast – yep, with good hosting, the best caching, an optimising plugin and every trick in the book thrown at it – it can indeed be almost as quick as a vanilla 2022 FSE install with no optimising at all… shat… it’s just shat!