Pinegrow Offspring -- Pine Seedling -- Designer App Coming?

@Pinegrow_User & @Marf And I thought nobody reads those deep nested YouTube comments :slight_smile:

Yes, we are working on a Pinegrow sibling.

Pinegrow is a general purpose editor for HTML and CSS/SASS/LESS. That means we can’t make many assumptions about what kind of projects the user will load and what kind of edits they’ll do. On one hand, that makes Pinegrow very useful and powerful, but on the other, it limits us in ability to make editing tools simpler.

Like Pinegrow, the new app (let’s call it PGS here, like PineGrow Sibling) also comes from the need / wish to make certain parts of web development easier - but this time more from the creative / design side.

The main point is that at the moment, turning a creative vision into a web representation is quite a technical process. So in PGS, instead of working with CSS directly, we have a collection of design skills that accomplish a set of common design goals directly.

For example, let’s say you want to display a 100px wide line under all H3 headings. In PG (or in any CSS based approach) you need to translate this into an :after CSS rule with a bunch of properties. In PGS you would just say “Add a line under headings” and set its parameters…

Of course this approach has some limitations in what you can do. But it’s quite easy to expand the set of design skills as needed.

So the main difference between PG and PGS would be in how styling is done. As far as building the HTML structure is concerned, I think, what PG does now is quite solid. Also, the success of tools like Webflow shows that designers are able to move beyond the “paint rectangles on screen” approach and embrace working with the styled nested HTML structure instead.

PGS would be a desktop app, like PG. It will work with HTML files directly and output properly organized SASS and CSS code. You’ll be able to edit the project in PG or other tools, except styling that was done in PGS (if you want to keep the ability to continue editing it in PGS).

So, we’re sticking with our “the more is better” approach to web tools. What we have to do right is the product placement. The difference between PG and PGS and how the two apps can work together have to be very clear - PG is confusing enough by itself with all its features and editions. Imagine adding another product into our existing PG pricing tables :wink:

Looking at the app architecture, Pinegrow is at its core a general purpose visual builder for structured documents with add-on modules that implement stuff like CSS editing, WP integration, Bootstrap support and so on. That allows us to relatively quickly develop separate apps based on the Pinegrow platform, sharing the same code. Most features are part of the Pinegrow core, so there is the benefit of improvements done in one app being carried over to the rest.

For Pinegrow 5 the main focus is improving the styling with CSS/SASS. What we have now is a powerful foundation, but some parts of the workflow are still awkward, for example, working with nested SASS structure.

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