The idea behind Easyblocks is quite simple. Today if you want to create a custom text editor for your product you have a lot of options with different abstraction levels: Slate, Lexical, CKEditor, TineMCE etc. But if you want to create a custom PAGE BUILDER there's not much to pick from. There are GrapeJS or WebStudio, but they're based on HTML/CSS (there's a HTML nodes panel on the left and CSS properties panel on the right), which is too hard for most people. There's no abstraction over the HTML/CSS that would make the experience simple and foolproof.
Easyblocks architecture is based on a novel concept called No-Code Components. I personally find it fascinating. No-Code Components are defined with code but are also visually editable. Each No-Code Component can have CUSTOM styling properties which makes it both visually flexible and not overwhelming for end-users (no CSS overhead). It's as if you could build your own visual blocks with Squarespace-level simplicity. You can build the most custom logic out there and yet leave the user with something super simple to use and customised.
Btw, it all started with Shopstory - a visual page builder for headless CMSes (https://www.shopstory.app/). We had a moderate success with it but during the journey we got asked by multiple software vendors if they could use Shopstory INSIDE of their products. Since we had quite an advanced editor and architecture behind Shopstory we thought that we should make it public for everyone.
Headless means that you're using e-commerce platform only via API and build your front-end in whatever tech you want (next, nuxt, Remix, etc). It's different from a traditional approach when e-commerce platform handles front-end (HTML templates rendering). In Shopify can do both.
In e-commerce space you might take a look at: https://theheadlessclub.com/. It's exactly what you're looking for. Quote from about page:
"Most directories tend to put emphasis on shiny and showy hyper-animated web experiments. Unfortunately, many of these projects fail when criteria like performance, mobile, usability, and accessibility are considered. It’s hard to find one single resource on the internet that would combine both the technological excellence and highly polished design in ecommerce space. The Headless Club started as an internal agency tool to foster ecommerce best-practices across our development team. Now we’re sharing our findings with you."
Disclaimer: I'm the co-author (with folks from commerce-ui.com agency). We'll soon make it not specific to headless but to all e-commerce stores.
Hello, founder and CTO of www.shopstory.app here. None if these arguments apply if you build page builder right. I believe we're on the right path.
First, it works inside of headless CMSes. It means that you get all advantages of structured content and yet add sprinkles of unstructured content when you need on top of that. You can always connect structured data into visual blocks built with Shopstory.
As for design consistency we build everything around design tokens. Not only fonts and colors but also page margins, grid gaps etc. Also, you will soon have permission system where designers can build templates but editors can't modify visual properties.
The bottom line is that I believe in the future we won't need to make a tradeoff between visual vs structured. You can have both at the same time and just fine tune the system to whatever direction suits you better.