Hi,
I am new to Wix,
trying to understand how developers can help Wix users and get some award. What is the process and what kind of serives is possible to provide?
So far, the collaboration between Wix users, Wix and developers, IMHO, is:
- The old way (Non-corvid)
A developer creates a widget, hosts in own environment and loads it as iframe (a page in a web page).
A wix user drags and drops the widget in the Wix site builder. Probably pays for it after a trial period.
There are many problems in this approach:
a) Developers should host their widgets and logic in their environment, not in Wix.
I guess that bad developers just buy a cheap shared Chinese/Inidian machine.
The consiquenece is that Wix users complain about the 3d party widgets not being accessable.
b) A good dev team should invest big resources in a global infrastructure (AWS, Azure or Google Cloud) to support the users worldwide, otherwise connection from Autstralians users to an Ireland host will be slow.
Very pricey and risky for a season developer.
c) Bad developers started to create garbage widgets. A response from Wix, as I see it, is to create new widgets by Wix.
So most of the widgets are now controlled and developed by the Wix team itself.
In the dev tutorial it is written that a deloper should create a widget, only then contact Wix to request whether the widget is needed and can be added.
This is a showstopper for almost any develper. Let us say that I want to create a forum widget, then spending 5 months to build a good one. Contacting the Wix team and the reply is - we do not want it, or we also develop our own forum widget, or we already created our own and do not want to see competition with our extension.
Really bad approach, here looks like 3d party extensions are not needed or will be used as a market test, and the same widget will be created by the Wix team later.
- The new way (Corvid)
Great platform for a fast site development, also resolves the problems from the point 1.
However, for an average Wix user it looks like an attempt to teach a non-IT client some programming skills.
This idea does not simply work, and most users will request developer support to write JS+CSS code or setup DB integration.
Wordpress, Magento, Joomla, as many other platforms, have large developer communities with massive webstie layout and extensions markets - great competition.
At Wix, it looks like a developer is non needed, except small customers support task, the Wix team dominated the extensions market in Point 1 by re-creating widgets, and there is no clear strategy in Point 2 for developers.
Please do not consider this as a big critical opinion from a new user, I am just trying to understand how good developers can provide features to the Wix users, whether Wix drives it. Consider long investment cycles and extensions support, good development is not cheap.
