Plasmic should use existing code component libraries

Ideas and Feedback
1

I feel Plasmic tries to build its own way of web development, which isolates itself from others.
Nowadays people use Bootstrap, Material-UI these famous Interactive component libs to build their websites. Plasmic is not based on all of them. If a company only has few people know how to use Plasmic, how can he cooperate with others?
I think converting figma design to html and css is a good point. For the rest part, I can see Plasmic tries to use its own ways to create interact components, such as recording an action. But is this a really good idea for these developers?
I feel that Plasmic should become more popular and successful.

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2

Thanks for the feedback; we’re looking into ways to let you tap into existing component libraries more easily. We know it’s a hassle today to figure out how to register each component.

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3

I tried to recommend Plasmic to some developers, it turns out they lack interest of it. I guess maybe this is because Plasmic is a tool which doesn’t have a close connection with other popular UI libs. In other words, Plasmic makes them leave their psychological comfort zone. They may think we are good with Bootstrap or others, why I need to use this? Registering UI or tapping existing component libraries will make some connections with developers’ daily work. I think it will lead to a better result than building your own UI widgets.

4

I would second this. It’s been a monumental effort to get some designers/developers to give Plasmic a try, even after enthusiastically endorsing it, and in many cases showing an demo. For the life of me, I don’t know why. I think the perceived switching cost and learning a new, somewhat obscure tool, is causing people to put off giving plasmic a try. My suggestion is through the will of the CS gods— push faster imports of component libraries, real-time collaboration, and waaay more video tutorials on popular applications people want to build. I think a lot of us want more people to use plasmic and we’re happy to help spread the word.

5

You guys can always read my mind.

6

Has this been implemented? I can see its from 2021

7

is this done yet? I don’t really see a documentation with an example yet. I see a lot of npm package but not sure how to use them.

8

Currently, Plasmic supports registering components, and they could be directly from an npm package. You’ll just need to tell Plasmic some metadata such as what props it expects. Documentation: Registering your code components | Learn Plasmic

Besides this, we have lots of built-in components now. You can type what you’re looking for in Plasmic Studio’s insert menu to see what we have.

Plasmic doesn’t have a way to automatically import an entire npm package yet. It is quite a difficult technical problem of knowing how to parse the code and infer metadata properly.

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