Pinegrow for Mac

I switched from Flux to Pinegrow and got along well with Pinegrow from the beginning. The user interface is clear and concise, everything is where you need it. As of 4.9 there is also CSS Grid support, which even allows me as a beginner for my occasional HTML adjustments to achieve the desired results. And I hadn't found any bugs yet.

I am using "PineGrow 4.5 PRO + WP" with e few extra goodies installed such as "WordPress Starter Theme for Pinegrow" and "BootStrap Blocks for Wordpress" ... it's saving me a lot of time and frustration ... it's an excellent tool for professionals but may have a slightly steep learning curve for beginners ...

I've been keeping an eye on the development of Pinegrow as I remain curious about its progress. After all, Pinegrow's premise sounds rather appealing. Unfortunately, after many hours of testing the latest version (3.07 as of this writing), I became entirely convinced that it was NOT a good solution at this point.

Overall, it is extremely buggy. None of the bugs I noticed are major, but all kinds of cosmetic errors are everywhere, and they all slow you down. I've had so many "...huh?" moments that the user experience has become annoying and irritating. The learning curve is very steep when you try to figure out where all the GUI controls are. There are just so many options that even a simple CSS change sometimes causes quite a bit of scroll-and-hunt-down workflow frictions even when you already know where it is. I know HTML/CSS well enough that it's so much easier and faster just to spell out what I want using Emmet and snippets in other code editors.

Wordpress theme generator is very confusing to figure out as well. At this level of the learning curve, I can't help thinking that I would be better off just learning straight Wordpress coding and skip learning how to do it through Pinegrow altogether. It kind of works ok if you are inserting some basic stuff, but it quickly gets lost if you need to do a lot of custom if-then type loops.

It still can't fully render dynamic code inside Pinegrow. You have to resort back to a code editor if you need to handle PHP partials, existing Wordpress themes, and any other types of templates.

If you want a visual way of navigating code, I suggest you try Brackets.io. It's free, it's open source, and it works far better than Pinegrow. For example, if you are working with a straight HTML/CSS file for designing, you can open a Live Preview window, click where you want to edit, and the corresponding code gets highlighted in the main code window. The code is right there, unlike Pinegrow in which it hides the code under a very complicated and convoluted UI. You have to click around to get to it. So much for boasting how it is "code-friendly." Press Command-E and all the CSS styles affecting the element is exposed right on the spot for quick editing. Autocomplete is much smarter as well, so you can just "spell out your UI" faster than hunting down an element and dragging. There is a large extension community for Brackets.io, and you can find just about any niche functionalities you might want for your workflow.

I don't see how any serious developers with coding knowledge would consider using it. And I don't see how Pinegrow can help coding novices with such a convoluted UI and workflow with full of cosmetic bugs.

Wouldn't it be better to say that the WordPress version is $120, rather than $49?

My favorite tool. Great product. I have been working in the web design business since the 1990s, progressing from simple HTML through responsive design. If my client ever asks for a tool that they can use to update and make small changes, this is the product I recommend.