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Minh-Phuc Tran
Minh-Phuc Tran

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at phuctm97.com

Reverse-engineer A No-code Website Builder

What and why?

No-code is becoming a big part of modern product development, it encourages an agile approach and accelerates iterations. Understanding how a no-code tool is built can be an advantage for a developer.

In this article, I'm going to analyze Carrd.co, a service for building responsive one-page sites, break it down into components to briefly see how a similar product can be built.

Steps


The Output

First, let's look at what can be made using Carrd.

Personal sites

Personal sites

Landing pages

Landing pages

(See in details at carrd.co/build)

Essentially, the output you can get from Carrd is simple yet beautiful and responsive personal sites and landing pages.


Design Concept

Every no-code builder has a design concept, which is basically how its outputs are structured so that they can be built, serialized (saved to disk), and reproduced (rendered on screen).

For Carrd, there're 4 primary concepts:

  • Site: deployment configuration of a site such as title, description, language, domain, SSL certificates, Google analytics, etc. In software engineering, Site is basically a configuration file for DevOps automation.

The image is taken from Carrd.co

  • Background: each Site has a Background component, which sits behind all of a site's elements. When rendering on browsers, Background is technically a mapping to CSS background property of HTML body, which can be styled to show either a solid color, a gradient, an image, or a video.

Image taken from Carrd.co

  • Page: the container of all of a site's elements (except for Background). Page defines how a site's overall layout looks, how elements should be aligned to each other. A Page can also be styled and positioned to show like a card or a window. When rendering on browsers, Page is technically a top-level div.

Image taken from Carrd.co

  • Element: a widget on a Page such as Text, Image, Button, etc. Carrd has about 18 different types of elements. Each element has several properties that can be configured to change its behavior and look-and-feel. When rendering on browsers, each element is technically a mapping to a set of HTML elements and CSS styles.

Image taken from Carrd.co


Implementation Components

If you've experienced enough with a component-based front-end framework (React, Vue, etc), you may already recognize that Carrd is essentially a components library and a builder UI tailor-made for it.

Yeah, that's exactly it. However, to make it a full-blown product for non-developer users, we'll need a couple of other components. In a word, we'll need:

  • Components Library and Compiler: together define what elements are available for uses, how they are compiled into HTML/CSS/JS (or other presentations if you're building for platforms other than web).

  • Builder: a graphical user interface application that allows users to pull elements together visually, instead of writing code.

  • Serializer: a service that writes what users built visually with Builder into disks (database, text files, etc) and vice versa.

  • Publisher: a service that publishes a site's output along with its configurations to a hosting or distribution channel (Amazon S3, Vercel, etc).

  • Dashboard: the UI for managing one's account, sites, and stuff other than building.

  • Homepage: the website itself, including its logo, landing page, signup page, etc.


👉🏻 What's next?

I hope this article gives you an idea of how a no-code platform can be built. 🙏

If you like it, follow me on Twitter, where I write about open-source and coding tutorials, befriend, and discuss fun stuff together! 😉

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