Sandvox replacements - sparkle, everweb, bloc, softpress ??

[wegster]

Hey all,

A long time ago, I was doing more than enough coding at work including after hours, so wanted 'simple and quick' for my personal sites and blogs. iWeb became too limiting pretty quickly, but Sandvox turned out to be a reasonably good replacement so off I went. Some of my site stagnated for a while, but I revived a couple of them to find out that Sandvox still works, but it's pretty dated and basically out of support/seems to be a dead-end now, with nothing since 2017 and no official announcements from Karelia of anything at all to come...sad, as I've used it now for it seems like going on 15 years.

I can still work with Sandvox, at least for the moment, but am looking into replacements.

I'd love to find an option that worked on both macOS AND iPadOS, but I expect that's just asking for too much - and I am NOT looking for a web-driven builder or editor, nor Wordpress and friends. I did some prior sites on to pdf heavily customized Drupal, have my own hosting with the usual tools available (mysql, shell access, php, etc.) and am not looking to change any of that, but also not looking into needing to code for effectively what amounts to a bunch of blog-type posts, image galleries, and a few PayPal links here and there.

Prefer:

• desktop application, non-subscription model. Mass bonus points if also has an iPadOS version.
• Has a reasonable approximation of 'blog' mode with baked in next/prev
• Has a reasonable semi-auto-generated site nav, e.g. simple global menu creation and subsections, collections, etc.
• Ability to inject, examine or override code - html, CSS, php - to varying degrees
• Has reasonable set of templates that are not individually add-on purposes. Not looking for any crazy 1000+ free templates, just some basics with selection of layout and e.g. header image colors...Sandvox type is fine, e.g. top nav + main page with or without sidebar, etc.
• sane image re-sampling - e.g. do something intelligent and auto-resample for web when I drop a 4K image in, or if I re-size inline in the tool from full screen to quarter screen, etc.
• No excess pay to make useful beyond the initial purchase. I don't mind paying for good software or a truly worthwhile set of templates or similar, but some seem to think every feature, template or tutorial is an upsell 'opportunity.' Meh.

That's really about it. Seems like the options I'm coming up with are:

• Everweb
• Sparkle
• Blocs - proprietary format, no basic SFTP integration, no basic HTML import, seems like an add-on/upsell mess...$150 for tutorials.
• Freeway - seemed like softpress went out of business, but now they're back, while freeway is 32 bit and their replacement is in beta...not sure it's worth considering right now until seeing where they go..

I also looked at Pinegrow, which looks cool but I'm looking for simpler, WYSIWYG with only occasional coded injection or overrides, so it's not what I'm looking for at this time.

Anyone have any feedback on the above, or better yet, has already looked at the above, including migrating from Sandvox and general usage? Am I missing any other worthwhile meeting my preferences?

 

[wegster]

Playing with the trial versions of the above.
Also adding RapidWeaver 8.x and Mobirise into the mix at the moment.

Everweb is reasonably easy to knock something out quickly in. Quirky but we'll see. Looks like it stores non media files as xml blobbed messes. Looking at if code injection, CSS overrides or access, etc. is possible. Preview generation is interesting, as it does puke out a bunch of html, js and xml files which tidy pukes all over, not so surprisingly.

Blocapp - Just starting to mess with. Took a bit to sort of manage one page. No templates I've seen for quick start (pretty much doing a handful of sites in blog format with a number of different sections). No out of box for image captions, but can just add a text box or text link underneath. Has some neat 'modern' website functions like fading in and out of text and sections. Somewhat annoying in seeming inability to grab and re-arrange 'blocks' or sections easily, but I may be missing the how on this one. Has a code widget. Can't see what the exported code looks like in Trial mode apparently. Unsure how to sanely add media files, as it wants to default to the macOS Media Library which I have synced with 'Pictures' at the moment, but it can't handle HEIC files directly, nor seemingly filter them out. Would be nice to have a sane filter or convert and optimized for web from masters option.

RapidWeaver - Just starting to mess with. Not sure what I think of this one yet. Used Dreamweaver way back but had always reverted to just coding by hand, which puts me full circle as I want simple-ish nowadays but with some flexibility. Seems likely to be an add-on/$$ story here - RW8 + <who knows?>?

 

[wegster]

For anyone eventually going along later, I think it's down to RapidWeaver + $$ or Blocs, although Bootstrap Studio and Pinegrow may have future relevance - neat tools and capable but not enough on the low coding side or content creation side as they sit right now.

Still debating.