The philosophy behind Velo by Wix is quite simple: to enable the experience of accelerated web application development. When working to create the platform, we first needed to identify the technological pillars that would make that experience possible.
Our foundation was Wix’s visual drag-and-drop builder, where each element features unique properties and functions. From page backgrounds and buttons, to repeaters and slideshows, the ability to customize styling, include animations and add events for visitor interactions—all without spending time on HTML or CSS—was already in place. Velo, as a platform, has been growing from this foundation and continues to grow every day.
Below are the five main tech pillars that enable Velo’s development experience:
Velo has an intuitive visual builder to help accelerate your front-end development. It has 100s of UI elements, like text boxes, buttons and images, which you can connect to data to create data-driven pages—all without writing any code. There are a bunch of different elements that you can use for your design, including repeaters, tables and galleries, as well as dropdowns and radio buttons to gather user-submitted data. Each element exposes an API that allows you to change its state, or you can add events to it with your own code.
From this, we quickly saw that with a few lines of JavaScript, you would be able to build production-grade data applications quickly and efficiently—all while allowing you to retain your code’s flexibility. With this in mind, we saw that it’s crucial to go beyond the visual builder and take full control of page element behaviors using code and APIs.
With Velo, you can develop the way you want, with the tools you want. There’s a built-in IDE and integrated databases to help streamline the process, or you can work in your own environment and with the source tools you prefer. With this combination, you’ll get all the benefits of a modern development environment—with zero setup.
With the built-in IDE you’ll get intelligent code completion and syntax highlighting, meaning it’s easy to stay organized and keep track of every line of your code, from keywords, function names and declarations, to parameters, comments and more. With Velo-CLI you can set up a local version of your site to work collaboratively with your own tools. There’s also a Developer Console to preview, test and debug your code before you publish your site. Overall, you’ll be able to maximize your workflow with no setup, one-click deployment, gradual rollout of release versions and application telemetry.
When using a serverless platform you never need to worry about setting up and maintaining a server means it is here to stay. With Velo’s serverless architecture, you’ll be able to run your application on the secure Wix Cloud with serverless Node.js—all without worrying about security (we take care of that for you).
Within this framework you can easily install npm packages, perform scheduled jobs, and create routers to control how your application handles incoming requests. You can also expose your site’s functionality as a service and access third-party APIs, without revealing their credentials, and add sensitive logic or hooks for different events. All of this helps you focus on your code and functionality of your site, rather than working to maintain a server.
Importing data from an external source is simple and there is a built-in database to help make things even easier to manage. With your databases, you’ll be able to maintain and present content anywhere on your application. When you use the integrated database you can access your data from a centralized interface for simplified content management and application runtime.
You can also use your databases to create collections and maintain a relationship between them using joins. You can easily set up and build as many collections as you need for content you want to display on your site, or information submitted from site visitors. You choose how and where to use this data on your site and control permissions for who can view, edit or add to it.
With data collections you can also create Dynamic Pages, which use a single design layout to create a unique page for every item in your collection—each with its own content, URL and SEO. You can display different items without modifying your page design, like recipes, a product catalogue, real-estate listings, and events.
Velo also provides you with a way to streamline your business processes with common business solutions already built for you. So, for example, you don’t need to build an online store from scratch or figure out how to add new payment methods to your site or application. You can simply drop hundreds of ready-made components and you’ll be business ready. This helps you transform your online business with custom functionality that enhances your customers’ shopping experience and drives more sales. With your product catalogue available to Velo’s integrated database, you can display product info on any page of your site and create advanced features.
With a few lines of JavaScript you can also add related products, a wishlist, ratings and reviews, or a gift-buying quiz to your store. If you take bookings online, you can easily enhance functionality with APIs. You can fully customize your service pages, showcase offerings based on location, add visitor comments, reviews and more. There’s even useful APIs pre-made for your members, which allows you to add functionality that lets you know if users are registered or logged in, and send triggered emails to contacts. You can then give your loyal customers and contributors their own personal area on your site. Members can view and update their profiles, connect with one another and enjoy exclusive access.
What will you build with Velo by Wix? Visit wix.com/velo to get started today.
