All the features I've used on Bubble

Excited to see how this rolls out!

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Impressive app. Thanks for sharing. It inspires me to think I might be able to do this at some point. Iā€™m working on a employee/recruitment tracking tool and have been getting stuck, so to see someone do this in 6 months makes me happy!

Be well,

Lane

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Weā€™re talking about a few months there though.

In terms of quality review - perhaps go down the same sort of road Product Hunt does. A limited group of experienced users have the ability to see submissions and approve them for release.

To submit something a user has to have used Bubble a certain length of time and perhaps completed other milestones to do with competence in using Bubble. (a bit like using this forum). Once a user has had several of their own submissions approved theyā€™re then invited to be able to approve other submissions.

If you can tie this to some sort of reward system for people that put in time to review stuff then even betterā€¦ although Iā€™m sure there are more than a few people here that would volunteer their time just to see Bubble take off.

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Why not create some public apps and let the community build the front end. This could save development time.

Exactly truth - at first Bubble seems like a scam or hard to believe that you can ā€œcodeā€ a complex app without code, but it can! Happy to invest here.

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Hey @emmanuel,

I can provide a logo and description for you no problem (via email). Right now I have my app as well as a duplicate (2 private apps). The duplicate is used for tech support right now so that user accounts for tech supports could be created and have them troubleshoot some display issues Iā€™ve had with the app, without affecting the operation or data of the live app that we are using. Is it possible to create a third duplicate that is a public app that I could tweak so that people could easily create accounts and navigate to the different pages and features? I wasnt sure if I was limited to two private apps or if I could have a public app as well. Where is the setting for private vs. public?

Im loving the idea of a short video clip to show a feature. Either how it is used and the scope of its application or even a timelapse of its creation. I would be willing to create videos of the features Ive already listed. Over time I imagine there would be various versions of how to accomplish timesheets and payroll, So managing duplicate features or collaboration is the challenge. It looks like a couple members have already started some public apps to showcase these features: see Introducing Featurebase, for use on the Bubble Forum.

I can wait until Bubble has settled on a way to approach this. Shall I go ahead and showcase the features in short video clips?

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As for plugins that Ive used:

API Connector: This was needed to run our url shortener. We have a url call to our domain which returns a shortened url. This plug-in automatically encodes your values, so we no longer needed two of blockspringā€™s plugins (XML/JSON Explorer and URL Encode). As a side note I also no longer needed the Random String generator from Blockspring as I now just truncate the unique Id that Bubble creates for every ā€˜thingā€™ in Bubble.

Braintree: We used to process through wufoo forms with a Braintree integration. Now that Bubble has a Braintree plugin, we could use our Braintree account to process right from Bubble. Now we donā€™t need Wufoo at all because we can create forms for taking orders as well as payment processing in Bubble.

Calendar: This is crucial for our timesheets and payroll. Only issue I have is I canā€™t remove the time of day that is prefixed to all event names on the calendar (12a for example). Nice to have it be clickeable and to color encode events!

Multifile Uploader: This is needed for adding projects. Clients can attach pdfs of their house floorplans. We can drag and drop email attachments to an order so other designers have the files they need.

Progress bar: Great to visually show on a project management dashboard. I needed to tweak it ([Solved] Progress bar cant handle thirds (1/3 done)). Also created a dashboard for clients to see the progress of their order.

Rich text editor: Emails are copied into this box to add as notes for new projects. Highlighting, bolding, underlining is needed for us.

Select pdf: Needed to automatically create pdfs from a page. We can create invoices and save to pdf with a single click with this plugin. Otherwise you would have to go to the page, print to pdf.

Zapier: We still have to export some our data to other apps like Google spreadsheets or Quickbooks Online. This makes it easy to translate which elements in bubble match the elements you want to create, edit, find in other apps primarily using webhooks.

Slideable menu: Starting to make mobile versions for timesheets and project management and the chat elements of the app. Nice to have something ready made as it is hard to get something to slide horizontally in bubble. If I try to build it myself, even if the menu is hidden, the space taken up by the menu will cover other clickable elements on the small mobile page and make them unclickable.

As for users and roles, mostly I used yes or no fields on the user element in the database (Admin?Superadmin?Manager?Designer?Accountant?Tech Support?Reviewer?, etc.). The yes or no could be toggled from a Page that showed users and their roles. Things could be hidden or shown based on the userā€™s role as well as searches could be limited by which role the user had. Applying a condition to an element could be done by checking the yes or no element on a user. Another way would be to create a new element of roles that has a set of yes/noā€™s so the roles could be edited as well. These roles could then be a list of roles on the user.

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I also need a list of features and itā€™s a good idea to organize what we have learned for future users of Bubble. I tried creating a demo app but I wasnā€™t sure if anyone was in need of it until now. In a way listing features does what Bubble is doing to coding, thus it might take consider time and work. If we are working as a group I could provide some ideas if needed.

You can definitely have as many public apps as you want. Itā€™s happening in the settings tab, general, or when you create a new app (or close one). Can you email support so that we take it from there re logo, description and quote.

Re having short videos, to be honest, were a little bit limited by our capacity, and still have to figure out what works. So if you want to experiment, thatā€™d be extremely helpful.

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@hvac_designer, this is really amazing, and I love how the user forums helped answer a whole bunch of questions as you were going through the process of building your tools! A few questions I had on your thought process:

  • What prompted you to actually decide to build all of these things?
  • How much experience did you have building websites or applications before jumping into this project?
  • Can we feature you and your project on our blog (medium.com/codeless)? Iā€™d love to have a more detailed discussion about what you did and tell the story of building something useful and worthwhile, without code.

Thanks for sharing!

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Hey @alex,
To give a bit of history, a fellow coworker had made a spreadsheet based version using mostly google spreadsheets for the project management, contact lists and timesheets. Working with spreadsheets can be challenging as each new month or year required duplicating a spreadsheet and over the years got more bulky. Single changes to one sheet had to be replicated on others and updating across the sheets was done manually. As our business grew, we would be limited by the spreadsheets (for example, some sheets that produce calculations could only be used by one person at a time).

Last year we redid our website on shopify, which I got experience on some html and how visual layouts work (how to embed things, some editing of the css). To handle incoming orders we started to use other third party applications. Wufoo forms to handle service requests as well as payment processing. Zapier was used to connect the wufoo information with our spreadsheets in Google spreadsheets. At some point having so many third party apps communicating, the desire for one unified program was desired. It was hard to find something that could handle our specific needs (eg. varied pricing in a service industry).

In looking at various app development platforms I started to learn how to relate database elements to visual layouts which was a first for me. Having the spreadsheets organized already helped me though. Each tab became a database element and each column in the sheet became a field in the database. The elements were related as they were in the spreadsheet initially.

We started with replacing our timesheet spreadsheet with the bubble one at year end to get used to user accounts and one page in bubble. I transferred data from our spreadsheets using the csv upload option. For a while I just populated the bubble app to keep it updated with our old system until the team switched to using the bubble platform.

As for being featured on medium I would love that.

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@hvac_designer Fascinating. Thanks again for sharing. It sounds like you and your team kind of stumbled on Bubble out of necessity - spreadsheets didnā€™t make the cut anymore.

Would you mind sending me a note at alex@gocodeless.io so we can tee up the blog post?

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ā€œA good quality review systemā€ might be a Stack Overflow clone, the best submissions float to the top.

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Should have followed up here sooner - but for anyone who is interested, hereā€™s what we wrote about @hvac_designerā€™s awesome home-built tools: https://medium.com/codeless/from-excel-to-excellent-6d6293a51e30#.if54lqj4a

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Can we put this at bubble.is/ideas and blog.bubble.is (youā€™d be a guest writer then)?

Thanks for your work Alex! Great writing!

Sounds great @emmanuel, please go ahead and post it. Let me know if thereā€™s anything I need to do. Thanks!

Hi, we have just launched bubblestore.io, would you be interested to sell your app there as a template?
see the forum post here: BubbleStore.io - Bubble Templates for landing pages, API configurations, workflows and much more

Thanks,
Levon.

Founder at Bubblewits - Bubble Certified Partner

http://bubblestore.io ā€“ a place to buy Bubble templates for landing pages, workflows etc.
http://iambubble.com - one page Bubble demo
http://builtonbubble.com - Collection of apps built on Bubble