The CMS for those who dislike coding! Built on Flask, Foundation and SQLite to bring the possibilities of Responsive Design to those who have neither coding skills nor the time to acquire them.
Duck Blocks is intended to be a Content Management System for those who need a website built, but don't have any programming skills or spare time to acquire them. After years of building websites for people using text editors and browser dev tools, the folks here at CCS Tech have heard a lot from the community and it is with this feedback that we set out to build Duck Blocks. Many of the people we helped had tried using other CMS like WordPress or websites like Wix to build their small business sites or web apps and simply did not like the experience. Many felt that at least some experience was required to work with them (some more than others). We also noticed that the gap in knowledge between your average web user and your average web developer or designer is getting bigger and bigger, a trend we've seen over the past several years. Duck Blocks aims to cater to these new web users and business owners by delivering a system that contains a grid-based, drag and drop website builder that is dead-simple and extremely user friendly.
Over our time as manual web devs we've used many tools, frameworks, and languages to build our customer's sites and web apps. Duck Blocks uses the ones we've agreed are our favorites to build both the back end (Flask and SQLAlchemy/SQLite), the front end (JQuery, BeautifulSoup, and Zurb Foundation) and all our helper functions (Python). We feel that these tools and Frameworks offer ourselves and other developers the extensibility, rapid prototyping, performance, and security that we love while giving our users a powerful system that can give them the website of their dreams in record time.
Duck Blocks uses its grid interface to get the layout and content from the user, which is then read by BeautifulSoup and passed back to Flask which uses various Python scripts to generate the HTML, CSS, and JS files that make up the site the user created in the editor. Creating a login system and User database will also come built-in with eCommerce support coming online later on. All files, scripts, and content that ships with Duck Blocks is completely hackable and we encourage all who use it as a developer to fork, modify, extend, and play with absolutely everything!
When finally released, we hope that Duck Blocks will help to fill the needs of small business owners and beginning developers who have not had luck with other CMS or fear that trying to build their own website will be too intimidating or complicated. Thank you for showing an interest in this project and we hope you join us on this journey!