Is it possible to build a Web App with webflow?

Hey guys!

So, I’m currently learning ruby on rails and know a bit of css, html and javascript.

I was wondering if I could design all the front-end of my web application on webflow and the backend with rubyonrails.

If you have seen anyone do this please let me know!

This would be a great way to create an MVP :smile:

Let me know what you guys think.

Cheers,
Alfonso Rodriguez

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I don’t see why not. Some things are to keep in mind:

Try to keep the Weblow exported files untouched, so you can continue to design in parallel and updates are easy.

Use the Custom Attributes in Weblow to add dynamic content to your WF pages.

Don’t use interactions with onScroll events, they’re being deprecated on mobile.

UIWebView is not Safari… So a webapp through “add to homescreen” or with Uiwebview on a native shell aten’t the same, eventually.

The last one is a oersonal belief: prefer building a bottom menubar a-la Facebook rather than using hamburger icon dropdown menu. Hamburger menus aren’t well perceived as menu by users, has been proven many times.

2 Likes

I also want to build a web app with Webflow (using Meteor, if that matters).

A few problems:

  1. I haven’t seen any tutorials on building web apps. They’re all focused on building static pages.

  2. The elements are focused on building web pages, and typical app widgets are missing. See MaterializeCSS or Ionic for mobile.

  3. I haven’t seen much guidance on integrating simple templating like Handlebars. You can set the text of an element to

     {{#each list}}
       {{> item}}
     {{/each}}
    

    but the export will escape any special characters because it rightfully thinks of them as HTML text:

     {{#each list}}
       <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;{{&gt; item}}
     <br>{{/each}}
    

    I’ve also tried adding that code as an HTML embed but the result was collapsed on one line and the > was still escaped:

    (this strikes me as a bug)

Maybe Webflow can be used to get started with a layout for a web app, or to build pieces in a WYSIWYG way and export them (them manage the code manually) but I don’t think it’s designed for iterating through a realistic development cycle (“Try to keep the Weblow exported files untouched”).

1 Like

I’m not quite getting everything. Making a web app and making templates that will become dynamic later are two topics.

I make templates with webflow, for both websites and apps. We usually add the dynamic info we need in Webflow by adding custom fields. Look for custom fields in Webflow, add them to some of the elements you want to render dynamic, see what effect it has on the code and talk with the developers to see how they can work with that.

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