Whether you are a developer looking to build a site for yourself / your customer or if you are a business owner who wants to set up a site for personal or business reasons, using a website building tool, that allows you to add code to your site easily, may be a real time-saver for you.
So today, we are looking at one of the most popular website builders available online – wix.com. To be more specific, we are going to walk through the features of Wix Code that has been recently launched by Wix as an extension to their already popular Wix Editor. Wix Code is another innovative product from Wix that adds a whole bunch of developer-centric features to the Wix Editor, allowing developers to rapidly and efficiently make SEO-compatible, robust web applications and websites.
What is Wix Code?
Wix Code is a tool especially designed for developers – to help add code to websites easily and create sites that function exactly the way you want them to. Wix Code facilitates glitch-free server-less coding – making it easy for developers to focus on building tailored web applications and websites. Wix Code allows you to easily create database collections, custom forms, and modify your site’s behaviour too via WixCode’s well-documented APIs.
Developers can leverage the intuitive visual components of the Wix Editor to save time and effort. Wix Code also helps ensure everything that you develop is SEO-compatible.
So let’s dig in and find out more about Wix Code.
- One-click deployment – WixCode comes with an in-built database, JavaScript backend and Integrated Development Environment – all hosted on the secure Wix Cloud. No need to worry about connecting to multiple servers!
- User Input – You can quickly create application forms (collapsing form, cascading form and more), review sections, quizzes and more. All of the data that is collected is stored in your database – and you can choose to use it wherever you like. You can also set up custom validations to review user input before saving it into the database. Control all of this via the Content Manager.
- Repeating Layouts – Feature the most important dynamic content on your website – like latest news, updates or business listings – using a single list or grid layout that connects to your database and pulls data from the database collections dynamically.
- Dynamic Pages – Create a single design style and use it for any number of new pages, each with a custom URL and unique content. Assign categories to organize content and update it easily.
- Database Collections – You can gather user data (like product details, visitor info etc.) and save it in a database. Decide how and where to use this data on your website, who can edit, add and view this information.
- Wix Code APIs – Powerful WixCode APIs + some Javascript = complete control over your website’s functionality. You can call external APIs or expose the backend of your web app as an API , via HTTP functions.
- Custom Interactions – With custom interactions you can add JavaScript code to your page elements to customize their behavior. Create interactions for anything a user does, like click a button, hover over a shape and toggle the page layout.
For instance, let us imagine that my client runs a cupcake shop, and wants me to build an ecommerce website, to showcase products and allow customers to buy them online.
Creating a new page for each product that is available in the shop will be extremely time consuming for me. With Wix code, all I need to do is enter a datasheet with the details of my product, and the code will automatically generate web pages for each of my product. Hence, using the database collections feature will help me to save a lot of time.
How to Use Wix Code?
To examine all the features that the Wix code provides, I signed up for a free account to create a website for myself. Yes, still continuing with creating my client’s cupcake shop.
This is the template I have chosen for my project. Quite appealing visually, isn’t it? I logged into Wix.com, answered a couple of quick questions, and bang! Got a draft of my site.
With the Wix editor, you can customize all and any of the sections you want, as can be seen on the screenshot above. You can edit or change the background, you can add or remove tabs, sections and images.f
In order to start using a database function with Wix Code you only need to fill in the spreadsheet. Using custom forms and user inputs is also very easy, at the same time helpful for gathering the data from your site visitors. For example, a food website could ask readers to submit their recipes or reviews.
There are plenty of Wix Code Examples related to content, user inputs, user interaction & more. To get an idea of Wix code power, you can open & view each of these examples in your editor or copy them on to your site.
What if I Want More from Wix?
Wix offers a bunch of customized plans that will allow the following changes:
- You can own your own domain (for example www(dot)MyCupcakeShop(dot)com), making it easier for my audience to find me. It also looks professional and adds credibility to my business.
- Wix Ads get removed (Yay!)
- More storage, which means one can use higher resolution pictures, content and graphics
Also, Wix offers a reliable, complete hosting solution for my site. Whether you have a premium plan or not, web hosting is provided free of charge.
Final Thoughts – Wix Code is created for developers, by developers
What I loved about Wix Code is that it focuses on developers and tries to predict all the needs that a developer might have while building a website. It has all the flexibility and functionality that you would traditionally expect to find within open source web-building communities.
Storing everything on the Wix cloud helps to avoid the hassle of taking backups and saving them online.
You can use Wix API’s to take full control over your sites functionality, like connecting a third party API and much more.
Plus, you can really benefit from the whole ecosystem around Wix too – Wix Arena where you can hire Wix experts, Wix Lounge – a free co-working & event space and Wix Meetups where you can interact and meet with other Wix users.
If you have any questions / views about Wix Code – please do leave a comment. We would love to know your thoughts.
