Announcing some fun new features (Nov 2019)

Hi Bubble community,

A lot goes on behind the scenes on Bubble’s product. Our Engineers are always hard at work on large, impactful features that will allow Bubble to empower everyone to create software visually.

But these large projects take time, and we have users - all of you - who are using our product everyday already to build your ideas and companies.

That’s why last Friday, our team tried something for the first time: a “hackathon day” where we took the day off from the large, impactful roadmap projects and focused on churning out as many smaller “quality-of-life” features as we could. None of these individually move the needle per se, but all of these ideas add a little bit more power or polish to Bubble (and many of these ideas came from you all in the community!).

Without further ado, here are the changes, roughly categorized, which have been rolling out over the last day or so (numbering is just for easier reference; also tagging the engineer who worked on it!):

Elements & Properties

  1. The clickability of hyperlinks can now be changed according to conditions defined in the Property Editor @riley

  2. The “parent navigator” at the bottom of the Property Editor now also shows the immediate children of the element @emmanuel

  3. Two elements’ positions can now be quickly swapped via the Arrange menu @peterj

  4. Multiple elements can now have vertical or horizontal centers be aligned with each other, not just to their parent element, via the Arrange menu @peterj

(Image showing new options for #3 and 4)

  1. New ability to specify facepad parameter on images processed with Imgix @aless

Dynamic statements & data

  1. A new option, “:defaulting to”, allows a default value for a text field in case it dynamically evaluates to a null value or an empty string @marca
    default_to

  2. A new option, “:append”, allows the combination of two strings of text, e.g. a user can now sign up with a username, and :append "@domain.com" can be used as part of the signup workflow to create an email address for the user (in this example, username@domain.com) @chris3

  3. When working with long dynamic expressions (e.g. “A and B and C and D”), deleting one clause in the middle will no longer automatically delete all following clauses. @marca
    deleting_part_of_dynamic_statement_v2_3

  4. In App Data, for default views of data types, there is a new message above the table in the event that not all fields are showing in the current view @aless

  5. Users can now add app version as a datasource @marca

  6. Users can now use ‘:minus list’ to subtract a list from another list @chris3
    image

  7. “:not in” can now be used in dynamic statements, such as “[item]:not in [list]” will return yes or no @chris3

  8. It is now possible to write “unique id <> …” statements as search constraints @Zoe

Workflows

  1. When editing a workflow action, it’s now possible to modify the field name of an existing line item, instead of having to delete an existing line and adding a new one. @riley
    change_workflow_action_field

  2. Workflows can now be copied and pasted between pages, including to the API Workflows page; events and actions which are not valid in the destination will be omitted @emmanuel

  3. Disabled workflows are more clearly marked as such in the Workflows tab @mattlegrand
    image

  4. When dealing with a specific datatype in a Workflow action (e.g. “Create a new thing”), there is a new option to “Expand all fields” [UPDATE: this has been changed to “Add all fields”] which will automatically show all of that data type’s fields as a shortcut @aless
    expand_all_fields

API-related

  1. Users can now see their app’s API URLs in the Settings tab of their app’s editor as a guide @marca

  2. When setting field types for API responses, there is a new option for fields that are in Unix timestamp format. @peterj

  3. In the API Connector, there is a new interface to import a CURL command - paste in a CURL command and Bubble will automatically parse it to extract what API settings it can. @riley
    import_curl_2

  4. In Logs > Scheduler, there is a new option to “Cancel all”, which allows canceling any workflows in the past that haven’t occurred yet (i.e. because tasks were paused) or all workflows period @aless

Other

  1. The error message shown when there’s a bad internet connection (“We are not connected to the server right now…”) can now be modified / translated @peterj

And while we have your attention, a couple features were released recently that can help with advanced SEO customization:

  1. Ability to do “Do a search for” in a page’s Title and Metadata @emmanuel

  2. “Get data from page URL” now has an option for pulling the “Path segments as list”, which then allows you to reference specific segments of a URL @marca

This was truly a team effort - not only did our Engineers hunker down to churn these out, but we also involved the rest of the company to help with QAing the changes and writing these launch notes! Thanks to @alex19 @DavidS @elisa @eve @malcolm @mattlegrand @neema @sam8. Thanks also to @josh and @emmanuel for their help leading Pebble Day, triaging / sizing ideas, and running code reviews!

Thanks to all of you in the community for some of these great ideas (especially to @fayewatson for her amazing thread compiling many of these ideas), for your patience as we continuously improve the product, and for your trust in Bubble. Hope you all enjoy :slight_smile:

Cheers,

Allen on behalf of the whole Bubble team

125 Likes

N.20 must be really useful!!
Thank you guys
Francesco

1 Like

This is great!

UX tweaks for Bubble Editor, finally!

1 Like

Wow, all those features are so great!
Thank you very much for improving our experience :smiley:

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Wow! I love this idea! Small quick wins… It’s like Christmas but better :santa:

They are all amazing and thank you all so much. I just want to list items that I really love…

My Favorite are:

  1. Parent Navigator - Finally an easy way around select parent. Thanks @emmanuel
  2. Swapped positions - Thanks @peterj - Do you think we can do this for elements in different groups? Beats copying and pasting with workflows any day of the week.
  3. defaulting to - Thanks @marca
  4. Deleting middle clause - So useful! Thanks @marca
  5. Minus List - Yes, yes, yes!!! Love it. - Thanks, @chris3
  6. unique id <> - Yes. yes, yes again :sweat_smile: - Thanks @zoe
  7. Modify field name - So elegant it should have been there from the start. Thanks @riley
  8. Workflow copies - I have been there so many times. Thanks @emmanuel
  9. Expand all fields - Did you read my mind? Thanks @aless
  10. cURL - Finally no more confusion between postman and simpler faster processes. Thanks @riley

Guys thank you so much!

7 Likes

Awesome, thank you so much!

Very nice! All of those new features are really handy

You did all this in one day? Wow.

You need to schedule Christmas a few more times a year! :blush::christmas_tree:

I had one or two suggestions for next go-around, I’ll have to remember them first tho! :laughing:

3 Likes

Many thanks, team. So many of these are just wow! Not quite two hours ago I looked at a cURL statement and wished I could just import it into Bubble somehow. I didn’t even dare think it might be possible.

1 Like

this is great thank you.

Amazing!
The ability to import a CURL statement along with the other new features will definitely be most useful! :smiley::smiley:

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I love you all!!! @bubble

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#8 Yes!!!

Amazing! These are all GREAT enhancements but for me #14 & 17 will be huge timesavers. :muscle:

Very awesome. Often little day to day changes mean more than 6 months on a big project. I’d love to see more of these. Maybe even have community voting on which items get worked on?

1 Like

This is crazy. If this is what you, the current team, can do in one day, then I’m curious about what you can do on long term projects.

My favorites

2 The “parent navigator” at the bottom of the Property Editor now also shows the immediate children of the element @emmanuel

5 New ability to specify facepad parameter on images processed with Imgix @aless

8 When working with long dynamic expressions (e.g. “A and B and C and D”), deleting one clause in the middle will no longer automatically delete all following clauses. @marca

14 When editing a workflow action, it’s now possible to modify the field name of an existing line item, instead of having to delete an existing line and adding a new one. @riley

15 Workflows can now be copied and pasted between pages, including to the API Workflows page; events and actions which are not valid in the destination will be omitted @emmanuel

20 In the API Connector, there is a new interface to import a CURL command - paste in a CURL command and Bubble will automatically parse it to extract what API settings it can. @riley

23 Ability to do “Do a search for” in a page’s Title and Metadata @emmanuel

24 “Get data from page URL” now has an option for pulling the “Path segments as list”, which then allows you to reference specific segments of a URL @marca

This one is not clear to me

13 It is now possible to write “unique id <> …” statements as search constraints @zoe

A little suggestion

17 When dealing with a specific datatype in a Workflow action (e.g. “Create a new thing”), there is a new option to “Expand all fields” which will automatically show all of that data type’s fields as a shortcut @aless

I would suggest to call it “Add all fields”.

Expanding, for me, makes an element bigger that already exists. This function adds new elements.

3 Likes

Great progress, I love it!

Those I still don’t understand :slight_smile:


1 you mean element link? I see now you can add your own picture, great!


9 don’t see the new message

Great work. Thanks!

Great work! I love it. Liked the feature where we can populate all fields at once and making change to thing doesn’t necessarily clear fields will really work when using “Current User” very well and want to change to “current page user” etc. Thanks alot

image

1 Like