I'd resurrect Headway Theme for Wordpress. It was kinda open source but had some proprietary bits in I think. And there is a fork somewhere apparently. But the software is effectively dead and not getting updated any more.
But that theme builder was absolutely amazing. Literally just drag and drop design for the entire theme, not just pages or whatever. Plus control over the loop and just some awesome stuff that really let you build very very cool sites really really quickly.
Elementor Pro now does some of what Headway was doing and I think Beaver Builder is moving that way, but they aren't really anywhere close to as good. Headway had graphical theme design absolutely nailed.
It's a big shame it went under and I wish it came back.
No and that's the difference Headway made. Wordpress 5 is concerned with the output of the 'content' part of the page. It lets you do what you could with a page builder, but more limited.
Headway is literally like creating the theme without coding anything. You build it out of blocks still but you literally just drew boxes onto the page where you wanted boxes to go (based on column system but CSS grid/Flexbox would be better now) and it would output the theme files for you.
And I'm not talking the page, I'm talking the entire theme. So headers, footers, custom pages, custom loops with custom queries, custom blocks mixed in with content blocks on the same page template to allow users to output content in the right places, same with custom fields etc.
It was incredibly powerful and let you effectively WYSIWYG the function of the site as well as then being able to switch over to the design module and WYSIWYG the design too. Plus managing custom CSS was easy.
Later versions let you draw/build and design in the same step like Elementor and Pagelines do, but those don't give you the same control over the functionality of the theme like Headway did.
As I mentioned, you can get most of the same functions Headway provided through something like Elementor Pro and combining it with something like the Toolset plugins. But those rely on integrating and there are issues (dynamically showing content generated by shortcodes currently broken for instance) which make the whole process much more of a chore.
But that theme builder was absolutely amazing. Literally just drag and drop design for the entire theme, not just pages or whatever. Plus control over the loop and just some awesome stuff that really let you build very very cool sites really really quickly.
Elementor Pro now does some of what Headway was doing and I think Beaver Builder is moving that way, but they aren't really anywhere close to as good. Headway had graphical theme design absolutely nailed.
It's a big shame it went under and I wish it came back.