More Information About Page Builder

Developing with Prismic
1

I'm evaluating Prismic as an option for my company's website rebuild. Right now we're used to WordPress and the Oxygen page builder plugin, which is a visual page builder that gives non-developers a huge amount of freedom for authoring pages.

In addition to creating "reusable parts" (which are not unlike Slices) and using those across pages, an Oxygen user can also directly add/edit/remove elements to any part of the document when needed. For example, if the hero section only has a "Try it now" button and they want to add an "Our Team" button right beside it, they can do that easily. Note that the possibility of a second button did not need to be accounted for in advance (as in the case of Slice variations).

I've watched the 5-hour Prismic website tutorial on YouTube, and so far, I'm not aware that Prismic offers this flexibility. The strong focus on Slices seems to require non-developers to choose from a set of components built ahead of time by a developer. They can edit things like button text, number of repeated elements, etc., and stack slices (vertically only) to build a page, but if they want to arbitrarily change layouts, add entirely new elements, or make other very specific changes, they'll have to go to the developer first.

If I am correct about the page builder's rigidity in this regard, I can definitely see its advantages in some cases. It helps guard against mistakes, promotes consistent branding, etc. But the non-developers on my team would prefer for this rigidity to be optional, rather than forced.

There are still plenty of advantages that Prismic has over WordPress, so this isn't a deal-breaker if accurate, but I do need confirmation in order to deliver an accurate comparison of the two. Is the page builder limited to just adding and editing Slices? Am I missing something? Is there any possibility for the more detailed page editing I described above?

2

Bumping this because we still need this information for evaluating whether we want to use Prismic.

3

Hi @josh.klope , apologies for the delay in getting back to you. The end experience of a user in the Page Builder is entirely determined by the developer and the experience they create in Slice Machine. For example, you can add to your slice the ability to change formatting options (e.g. ability to change the background colours etc.) and add some flexibility for marketing teams. However, from our perspective to retain brand consistency and reduce cognitive overload, the Page Builder should really be centred around editing content and editing the structure of the page i.e. the order of items, rather than it's form i.e. how it looks

Let me know if there is anything else I can do.

Best,
Guy