Just launched my app and I want to make a bunch of changes to make the admin panel more useful (to avoid using the incredibly clunky database viewer within the bubble interface).
However, just as I’m getting all these new users, i don’t want to push an update to the whole site which is going to cause everyone currently online to ned to refresh their page, potentially losing the current task they’re working on.
The admin page is obviously just for my admin account and not for general users, so it’d be very nice to be able to make updates to that page without affecting all the other online users.
Either that or add the ability to push updates to the live version that don’t need the user to refresh, but rather they just come into force next time the user naturally clicks a link or otherwise changes pages etc…
This would make it SOOOO much easier to do updates without having to take your whole site down for maintenance when you only want to do a few little tweaks.
(Apologies if this is already in this “ideas” area… i didn’t know what to search to find it).
Yeah no worries! Didnt expect it’d be simple. But having that as a long term addition would be good.
In the meantime, maybe allowing users to customise the “refresh this page” alert text could help. Even just to add an apology, and or a suggestion to copy and paste text into a notepad before refreshing so you know they’re not going to lose work (and hence lose confidence in your app! Which is the main trouble here I think.)
Eg if you wanna do 1 update, you can set the alert to say “Sorry, we had to do an update just now, but everything will be back to normal once you refresh”
Or if you know youre going to be doing more updates, set the text to “Sorry, we’re making some updates to the site. This could cause disruption for the next hour [or whatever]”
Nigel makes a good suggestion about the admin panel being possible as a separate app that’s linked to the same database. It would be great actually if you could potentially add a separate ‘admin panel’ option to every app, that will behave like this but without using up an “app slot”, of which i only have 2 as a basic user, and i already have plans to use my second app slot to build another unrelated app. (Since I presume it’d be a very bad idea to use a public app as you database management viewer!!)
Also it could have a few template database management layouts etc, to take out some of the setup headache. I’m sure you’re aware how buggy the “application data” view is in the Bubble editor, so this would be a really good way to solve that (ie make it so people dont need to use that view at all). I’m sure someone here would be happy to make some great templates if that were possible
Oh ok, great, that’s the partial workaround sorted for now then. Still the dedicated and separate admin panel thing would be really useful as a future addition, (though again I dont expect it’s super easy to add).
Sort of, but not if your app is global in it’s user base (mine is now, in a minor way, so there’s a few users on at all hours)
Currently i can set a ‘maintenance’ state on my admin page, which lets people finish their work but stops others starting new work. Then i leave it for an hour, then make updates, then turn off “maintenance” mode so people can use it again. Which works fine when you’re doing whole site updates, since you DO need to take the whole site offline. But i was saying, if you’re only making changes to one page rather than the whole site, THEN it’s be good if only that one page needed refreshing for users at the time. But I can understand if that’s not possible due to the way they built it.
