You're colleague suggested to provide the following as a feature request:

I’ve looked into your component library functionality. The core of it feels great but in terms of real-world web design (or template design in my case) Framer’s general approach misses the mark. Let me explain.

I come from a WordPress background and before website builders became a thing (e.g. Elementor) I built my own front-end editor on top of WordPress. The editor was part of a WordPress theme. If I came across a bug or wanted a new feature, I would program it into the builder and deploy it. That’s a standard software update routine and something I cannot do with Framer being a SaaS.

Your builder is way too granular to quickly build sites obviously. So what you’d call a “widget” in tradtionional WordPress site builder lingo, you’d call a “component” in Framer probably. However, building a new website (or template) is not done on the component level, at least not for the majority. It’s very important to understand that because it’s the key driver of how I use Framer. Rather, it’s done on the site level, then the page level and maybe here and there on component level.

The reason you don’t build a new site (or template) on the component level is that there’s a huge amount of work needing to be done on those higher two levels (site and page). Think creating a reusable template with header and footer (with additional table and phone versions), setting up new pages, creating a blog CMS collection that works. Even creating a new page and adding the tablet and phone breakpoints is a number of clicks; do that times 10 to get to the average number of pages for a standard small site and you’re doing dozens and dozens of clicks, over and over again for each new project.

The same goes for the page level. I’ve created a number of pre-made layouts for a page. The last template I designed uses a page for its services that holds 5 components for the main body, a reusable Hero and CTA component for top and bottom, and offers proper responsive design for tablet and phone in terms of layout and spacing. This template has 4 distinct service page. Just do the math how many clicks and searches it takes me just to make a single page (this template has exactly 10 pages, with 7 totally distinct designs).

Another issue I have with the component library is that I can’t see what’s in there. I currently have dozens of components spread out across 17 folders (CTA, slideshows, gallery, team member etc.) in my main “Library” project. Granted, I could use only the components from my Library project to fill the component library but not being able to see an overview of the component library is one of the reasons of not using it. Also how integrating a component from the component library works is very user-unfriendly; web design is very visually oriented: you want to see what you’re making. The component library doesn’t let you do that. Without the ability of actually seeing what components there are in there and being able to know what they look like, you have to make a decision about which one to choose. That’s fine if you know exactly what’s in there but if the library becomes big enough, which it will, or if you work with multiple people using the same library, it fails from a UI perspective.

I choose a clone of my entire Library project as the starting point for a new project. And I prune all on the page level everything I don’t need. Every site has a contact page, but not every site has a gallery page, or a pricing page or real estate listings. So rather than clicking to create new pages, clicking away with the component library and clicking to set up tablet and phone versions I prune which is much, much faster.

Using a clone as a starting point is a huge trade-off I’m making because a clone in Framer breaks the connection between the original component with the cloned component in the new project. So choosing to build new projects the way I do and achieving speed in the process introduces an inability to update all of the components at the same time. And I increase that issue with each new project I’m making.

Feature request

I’ll end this long email with the hope that it becomes clear why I choose to design how I design. Adding the feature to Framer to (optionally) NOT break the links between original components and the ones within the cloned project would immediately solve my update issue and adds a kind of deploy mechanism used in more tradtional software like WordPress.

From a web design perspective Framer absolutely trumps everything I’ve ever used in WordPress by far and I’ve created hundreds of sites. However, beyond design, that which you see on the outside, process- and workflow optimization, that what you can’t see on the outside, is key for small business owner like myself and there are some elements Framer can look into and I tried to explain here.