[chungwu]

Plasmic at its core is a general React app builder. You can create components, add interactivity, and connect to other data sources. You can also bring in your own React components, so there's endless possibilities in extending the tool for your needs.

Our users have used Plasmic to build all sorts of things, from websites and e-commerce storefronts, to Retool-like internal tools, to full web apps (major parts of the Plasmic visual editor itself is built with Plasmic!). The most popular use case we have is as a CMS -- once developers set up Plasmic, the marketers are able to design and publish sections of the website without developer involvement. One remarkable thing is that the dynamically-fetched Plasmic-generated design is part of the same React tree as the rest of your React app, so it is able to read from your React contexts, etc., making it possible to have rather deep and interesting integrations into your site.

Ultimately, Plasmic generates React code from your designs. This code can either live in your code base alongside the rest of your code, or be dynamically fetched (like in the CMS use case).

[bossyTeacher]

> You can also bring in your own React components

What does that mean? Does it mean that you can import your own components like using a standard import statement?

[chungwu]

Basically, you set up a "custom app host" -- stand up your server (which has your code components), and you add a route (say `https://yoursite.com/plasmic-host`) that renders a special `<PlasmicCanvasHost/>` component. When you open a Plasmic project that uses your custom app host, it loads your `/plasmic-host`, and the `<PlasmicCanvasHost/>` component bootstraps the Plasmic visual editor into the page. So now Plasmic studio is actually running on your page, and it can access your code components that you have registered to be used with Plasmic. We never see your code; it's a run-time integration.

[georg-malahov]

No, if you use codegen, you should register your component by providing additional necessary metadata, like importPath, importName and others. Then you can use you component in the Studio same way like other builtin components. Check https://docs.plasmic.app/learn/code-components-ref/ for more details.