🎉 Better Boilerplate by Not Quite Unicorns - Our take on what a good Bubble app looks like

[boston85719]

@randomanon

Multiple layers of nested reusables - For me this completely breaks the flow of designing/iterating. I can see how it might be needed on very large apps or if you think there will be no further changes to the UI for a very long time, but it just feels like I’m constantly “losing my place.” I like seeing all my workflows in one place, separated by folders. Making sense of certain workflows would be very difficult without the recently-added “go to custom event” feature, you pretty much have to depend on that. It’s just a claustrophobic experience.

Very true @randomanon

@boston85719

Don’t overuse reusable elements either. Recently I started to rebuild an app previously started by other developers who overused the reusable elements. They had buttons as a reusable element when it should have been just a button on the actual reusable element that required the button. Basically they had about 10 reusable elements that I had to pick apart and turn into the one reusable element necessary. A lot of times people pick up a new trick or have a unique approach to something and they begin to overuse it and apply it to situations where it is unnecessary and makes maintaining/debugging an app more complicated and tedious than necessary.

@randomanon

Also for the invoices I would personally just rely on Stripe’s “customer portal” thing instead of importing the invoices/etc into the Bubble DB.

For the most part true. Definitely no need to overpay for anything, especially the storage and retrieval of information. If Stripe has it, let them handle it. If you really need it in the app DB as well, save it as a the api object itself and leverage the cost savings of fetching api objects instead of custom data things.

@georgecollier

So every place a user’s first or last name updates, I don’t need to also remember to set the full name.

Since I struggle with this, the improper data structure around names, I’ve decided to try and simplify things and put that data on one location only in the database. Not much use in having the same data stored on two different data types so long as you relate things, which bubble does with the creator field, so if every single data type has a built in relation to user through the creator field, the likely best place as a single location to put the name of the user is on the user data type.

@randomanon

For API objects, does it really just say “data from API connector” in the editor? You can’t even click on it to see the data. That seems really annoying and inconvenient.

Yes, this just means, do not rely on the data tab as the source of information and build out in five minutes a page and visual of the data so you can see it or the app owner could, similar to a dashboard with analytics.

@georgecollier

I mean, fair enough. We work on apps with technical debt all the time and almost always find that the less reusable elements an app has, the harder it is to maintain.

The correct and most balanced way to use reusable elements is lost on many developers and is a complicated topic that takes some time to fully understand the nuances and tradeoffs.

@georgecollier

No because template marketplace has all sorts of pain in the ass admin stuff to deal with

You already have the documentation, you have the link in forum, and can easily setup the ‘demo user’ access. Other than those things, for free templates the only admin stuff is pressing the submit button. Bubble then verifies it works and puts it on the marketplace.

@georgecollier Thanks for sharing.

One suggestion. If you are putting this out as how to do Stripe properly, you should show how to initialize the Create Subscription so as to enable multiple subscriptions at once. I’d say as well, add in how to do that for products only, so can check out and pay for products, not just subscriptions. And maybe consider showing how can do multiple products in one checkout session.

If you want to take that further, show a checkout with multiple products and multiple subscriptions in one checkout. Stripe allows for up to 40 products and 20 subscriptions in a single checkout (maybe those numbers are different now since I last looked), but an optimal Stripe setup will enable multiple subscriptions and/or multiple products at once with a single action.

Those points were some of the things I saw as missing from Gregory John video on Bubble youtube about how to setup Stripe via API.