@matjaz
For what it’s worth, and speaking from a purely personal perspective.
The vast majority of my day to day programming over the past few decades has been done in Visual Studio and its predecessors in the dot net (and again previous) sphere. Working predominantly in code and then often creating required components from scratch has been a major part of my programming experience.
For as long as I could I avoided web working ostensibly because my knowledge of HTML was sparse to say the least, and that’s before one throws in CSS and JS into the mix. Ergo when it became necessary to do do some of this new fangled (to me at least) web stuff I looked for as easy a way in as I could find, which turned out to be WordPress and Divi. Going to Divi from Visual Studio was ghastly, no control, no ability to properly reuse stuff etc etc. Oxygen Builder came along and at least felt a little more like it, and with some of the tools that have been developed to make it more developer friendly (such as a cli) it’s not that bad a way to do word press.
However it would be stupid to pretend that WordPress is not changing and most of that change is Gutenberg driven so having been badly bitten by the Winforms / Wpf saga I sought out alternatives , one of which was Pinegrow.
For a Visual Studia afficianado Pinegrow is just great. If I want to work just in code that what I do, moreover I can do that in VSCode if I want to. I can develop sites for wordpress but I’m not limited to WordPress, another plus point. Because of the ease with which you can work in code you are immediately open to (when working on a WordPress site) the possibility of doing away with all sorts of plugins that were almost a necessity with page builders because you can just code the functionality that you need. However this does come at the cost of a very steep learning curve.
To start with there is the whole Pinegrow ide to learn. As with anything else that comes with practice and familiarity but it’s still a significant investment in time. Then if you come to Pinegrow to do predominantly WordPress stuff from a traditional page builder you suddenly realise how much of WordPress (not least it’s byzantine template system) was being masked from you and which you now need to gain at least a good rudimentary understanding off. Once again it’s not exactly rocket science but it does take time.
Pinegrow’s documentation is good in that it covers a phenomenal amount and is backed up by a vast array of video tutorials but it suffers from, in my opinion, one major flaw. There is too much intermixing of Pinegrow versions in it. A classic case in point is the documentation on setting up external build processing with Tailwind.
To bring this around to the actual subject of this particular post. Logic told me that if I created a master page in Pinegrow for my WordPress theme based on the index.html / php file which in WordPress template terms is the ultimate fallback and that if I added interactions to that then logically those intercations would flow through to anything that was based on them. I couldn’t see why therefore I was being asked to activate interactions on new pages that were based on that master page.
That was not explained in the documentation or mentioned in any of the videos I watched. Now that doesn’t mean that information isn’t there just that I couldn’t find it.
It’s these little hiccups along the way that take time initially to resolve and then allow you to progress to the next step. Experience and familiarity with the way that Pinegrow does things will allow you to get faster, especially when you know exactly what the end result should look like in code, just letting you write it directly in code in the first place.
I love the fact that Pinegrow is giving me an opportunity to properly learn HTML, CSS and JS in a way that I hadn’t done before but I have to accept that whilst I’m doing that actual progress (in terms of start to finish) on a new project will by definition be slower.
I hope that goes some way to understanding my perspective as a new user to Pinegrow, For me I suspect that interactions will always be troublesome (basic lack of understanding). Yes it would always be nice to have examples of absolutely everything but one has to be pragmatic and appreciate that that simply isn’t possible.