Why doesn't the BSS team work on tighter integration with popular IDE's and / or Django?

I mean think about it, putting in a Login form / page in BSS would be injecting an accounts app + login stuff.

It’s still not any where near NoCode, but it should be easily extendable with plugins. Everyone uses Django and likes to custom code because that’s still the most efficient way to write specialized algorithms, and if your site doesn’t have any code custom written by a human then it’s because it’s a non-unique, uninteresting site.

Anyhow, so code is always needed, so they call this LowCode.

I currently maintain a fork of a BSS-to-Django template generator, written by someone else, but which I debug and put more features on. Now, why can’t we “piece everything together”?

Check out github/enjoysmath for the repository.

Because BSS is Front-End tool, not full stack IDE for both Front/Back, maybe in the future BSS team will consider more “back-end integration”, but it’s not really hard to implement login systems etc if you would like to…

Its fine that it would be usefull for you, but most of ppl here can’t even code at all and are keeping making static websites for a living.

Personally I would like to see more from BSS like more “programmer friendly” cause I’ve stopped using BSS few months ago cause It was totally limitting my possibilities.

If BSS team would implement any way for login and register with some database to BSS it would allow BSS community to make really cool projects, but I wouldn’t expect anything like that in 2 years atleast, sadly… I was even thinking about making my own DND BSS inspired tool, but i dont even know if I wanna bother myself atm

1 Like

Apparently we are able to open up a .bsdesign file using 7-Zip and it’s not encrypted, but instead plain JSON text. I’m thinking of writing an HTML -to- BSS (.bsdesign) format converter. This way my current task of using a pre-existing Django (full-site / app) template for a jobs portal can be done much more efficiently and especially for future sites that I work on. They didn’t use BSS to design the site or at least they included no .bsdesign file. So I can either manually edit in everything by hand (weeks of work) or use this utility I’m about to write.

1 Like

Its known for really long time that you can open bsdesign as a json. I was thinking about making converter to bsdesign, but i wont bother myself i guess, especially that I’m now working on different project dedicated for bss.

GL tho

1 Like

I don’t know anything about Django and the like, but there is already an online converter that will do one page at a time turning your designs into .bsdesign files of which you can then start from one of them and copy all the pages into it to make a full design. I believe it was @R.Omer that created it. He is working on getting it to convert multiple pages yet. Here’s the thread for that information:
https://forum.bootstrapstudio.io/t/this-tool-will-convert-your-html-to-bootstrap-studio-file-bsdesign/8573/39

3 Likes

Thanks @jo-r I guess what I can do is improve upon what that tool does. Mine will be a standalone PyQt5 GUI (that you can download as an EXE release), with options on the GUI. It will then add in all HTML files, CSS, images, and Javascript for you, and also work with multiple pages. Not only that but it will “remember” the Django template Jinja2 tags (where they were placed). So then we can do round-trip Django coding to BSS editing and back.

Cool, will you be doing a Mac version?

1 Like

@jo-r Yes, PyQt5 / AutoPyToExe can build to Mac I believe.

@jo-r I’ve decided the first version will just connect to that site and use it as an API to do most of the work for the HTML, until of course it does something wrong, but then we just post-process the format with whatever is needed.

You might want to send a message to @R.Omer and see where he’s at with it. I know he’s working on a more robust build to be able to do more than one page at a time, but he may have other plans too and it would probably be a good idea to let him know you plan to use his stuff :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like

@jo-r I tested out that tool and apparently it either doesn’t work for all HTML files or it isn’t friendly with Django templates as is. I will try taking what the browser sees and converting it. If it works, I may have my first version just connect to this as as service, but of course merging & post-processing the JSON in the .bsdesign to be what we want (the whole project). Anyway I put in the register.html template from Django, and the result is currently a blank body in BSS.

I am a big fan of Django, but I believe BSS should remain as agnostic as possible. Although, there have been a lot of request to integrate with this tool or that tool, one reason I selected BSS is that it does one thing really damn well ( what I like to call stay in your lane development - SYL), lowers the time I need to get the front-end the way I want it to look.

For me, integration with BSS and any of the final outputs I use (Django, Pelican, or Hugo) for the web looks more like:

  • design the site and use labels
  • export HTML with labels included
  • parse the elements and place in the desired template(s) for the output - more than likely with Python , but I could do it in Java

One of my goals this year is to work on conversion scripts for the following tools in this order: Django, Pelican, and Hugo and share them with the community.

The team at Pinegrow have seemed to figure out SYL development for their WordPress theme converter, and give some love to Bootstrap Studio at the same time.

Use your favorite web design tool, Webflow · Dreamweaver · Blocs ·
Bootstrap Studio · any HTML editor to create custom WordPress themes

I want BSS to continue to do what they do pretty damn well, and perhaps add digital downloads to Reflow. Just my two cents.

4 Likes

I really like the “Everyone uses Django” in the post but obviously not everyone does. I don’t and by the replies, I’m not the only uncool kid in the group.

2 Likes

I’ve decided that creating such a tool (though I did start laying out the GUI in QtCreator) would take too much of my time. Instead, I will take the Django jobs portal template I have (I’m working on a job site of a unique nature), and carefully convert its existing pages into BSS. Then wherever the export script (another thing that @apowell656 knows about) needs features to integrate with Django, I will update that. Right now it works for what I’ve done so far on this other unrelated project, but most likely it will have to be featured out more. I think I want to rewrite that export script, because I really find the code difficult to debug. I think I could do a much better job at structuring the code for it. It’s a Python script, compiled to an EXE so that BSS can call it. So scrap the idea of an HTML to BSS converter that it is Django template-friendly, for now :slight_smile:

@j_allen_morris you’re absolutely right. I was speaking way too loosely. I can see here that we have some professional website developers in the house! BSS is great. I will code my website so that ALL frontend editing is done in BSS and exported to Django (there’s a script for this), so that I shouldn’t be hand-editing the Django HTML templates at all.

@apowell656 I’m not sure what you mean by “with labels”. :slight_smile: Could you explain that, sounds interesting!

@fruitfulapproach I could be wrong here so don’t shoot me lol. But … BSS has the ability to use the Labels, that you can give to each part of your components, as comments in your HTML. I believe it’s in the project settings.

I’m not sure if that’s the Labels that @apowell656 is talking about or not though.

@jo-r the BSS labels are the ones I am talking about. :grinning:

@fruitfulapproach I agree the front-end should be done in BSS and exported to Django. As I have been sketching out my thoughts on HTML to Django the BSS labels (or any comments or marker of some type) in the HTML would make any scripting easier.

A rough thought:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="ie=edge">
<title>HTML 5 Boilerplate</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
</head>
<body>
<div class="container"> 
<!-- Label start -->
<h1>Title</h1>
<!-- Label end/ -->
</div>
<script src="index.js"></script>
</body>
</html>

In this example, everything surrounding the Label would go into base.html and any subsequent labels would go into their own templates this example would be LABEL.html or an include (not sure yet).

I hope this gives some insights into my approach. My thought is also to make this a framework that can support a few templating engines/styles, but for right now, I am stuck doing it by hand. With SSGs I am familiar with, it does not take an unbearable amount of time, but it takes time. With Django, I am currently working on a project and using it as a benchmark.

I don’t either… Talking about Python framework, I prefer something like Flask; less dictatorial. Nevertheless, Flask is Jinja2 based too. Later (I think there are other priorities before), BSS could maybe handle Jinja2 which is a templating engine used by various frameworks.