Bubble Editor Ideas and Suggestions

fayewatson · April 18, 2020, 9:45am

Thanks so much for the awesome suggestions, @aloecf, @w.fly, @julienallard1, and @yusaney1! They’re now on the list as items 55 through 58!

chris20 · April 18, 2020, 3:55pm

Time to whip out the Jira backlog and start prioritizing I actually saw on spotify’s product board they allow users to vote on epics to help suggest prioritizing improvements.

aloecf · April 28, 2020, 4:55pm

Hi! So this is something I posted about on the forum, but would be great to implement. From a design perspective, setting up grids/gutters/margins are important for best design practice. Right now Margins are not able to be set so the left one is always 12px. Can we implement something to change the default margin for that left column?

varshneyandson · June 20, 2020, 3:07pm

+1 56 and 57

I unhide a bunch of elements in the editor. When I go to edit a re-usable element, then the group I unhide in my index is hidden again. Very annoying!

Updated: reported it as a bug
ezgif-6-e82dc65f430b

duke.severn · June 21, 2020, 3:00am

I don’t know if this has been mentioned before, but if you’re like me, “:defaulting to” is so useful for dealing with empty text values. Maybe having it for dates, or even numbers would often be useful as well.

w.fly · June 22, 2020, 2:48pm

Yea, 56 is the biggest one for me productivity wise. I deal with many pages on my apps - So to go from one page to another w/ many hidden elements, I spend too much clicking un-hide and “show all children”.

varshneyandson · June 22, 2020, 3:02pm

“Show all children” ← Honestly forgot about this option and/or was overlooking it, so thanks @w.fly for mentioning it . Screenshotted below for fellow n00bs like me

Also another update – Bubble support replied to my bug report on this and stated : “Regarding the element tree and the user interface in general, we are hard at work totally revamping the Bubble editor. The new version should be launched in beta by the end of the year.”

w.fly · June 22, 2020, 4:43pm

Nice! Well now I have a big reason to be excited about the new editor Thanks @varshneyandson

julian_digitalsilva · July 21, 2020, 2:57am

Idea for the editor: In workflow view and working with large number of workflows, I’ve assigned these workflows to different ‘workflow folders’. It would be great to have these workflows grouped by ‘workflow folder’ when viewing all the workflows.

gsantoro · July 23, 2020, 10:26am

One little adjustment which could really save some time and improve UX would be changing the cursor to pointer when hovering an Icon that has a workflow. We wouldn’t need to create groups only to achieve this effect.

gsantoro · July 27, 2020, 7:59pm

one more thing
it would be nice if we could choose the position of a popup element

fayewatson · August 4, 2020, 9:32am

Thanks so much @aloecf, @duke.severn, @julian_digitalsilva and @gsantoro! Those suggestions have been added as numbers 59 through 62!

@gsantoro I didn’t add this one only because I think it might be a Bubble bug. I believe all elements with workflows should cause the cursor to change to a pointer icon, but I have seen this bug sometimes occur with the Material Icons plugin. It may be worth it to file a bug report on this here: https://bubble.io/bug_report

duke.severn · August 4, 2020, 4:45pm

Thanks for curating this @fayewatson. While we’re here:

Ability to preload the :formatted as currency with the latest used values:

gsantoro · August 5, 2020, 8:10pm

Yes, that’s true! This issue only happens with a Material Icon. The regular icons work just fine.
Thank you for your suggestion. I have just filed a bug report to Bubble about it.

paul.dalpozzo · August 6, 2020, 8:23pm

When you select multiple items and make changes in the property editor, have it actually apply the changes to all the elements. For instance if I have 3 images selected, all different widths, and I change the width in the property editor it doesn’t apply it to any of the elements. It acts like it captured the change in the box but it doesn’t do anything in reality.

paul.dalpozzo · August 6, 2020, 8:26pm

Have the undo button display a short history of past edits like in Adobe or MS Office products. I sometimes lose track of what it has actually undone. Would be nice as a secondary feature if you could select multiple items in the history to remove.

paul.dalpozzo · August 6, 2020, 8:43pm

A couple more:

Add columns to the text element so that it will automatically reflow content in 2 or more columns
Add an “open in new tab” check box to the “go to page” navigation workflow. Currently this is only an option for the link element
In workflows when you roll over the workflow it gives you a preview of the element that it is applied to, make this preview appear in the workflow box so you can quickly find the element by scanning rather than having to hunt for it
Workflow folders are cool, but would be good if you could just group the workflows on the same page so they are all visible but grouped, next level would be if you could sort by element or function
Would be cool to have a “workflow tree” view so you can trace precedents and dependents (like in Excel) so you can quickly see a map of how workflows work together in complex combinations - like for instance a page workflow that schedules a backend workflow that then calls another backend workflow recursively, or allows easily viewing a user flow through workflows and pages
Auto-create inputs or outputs on a page from a thing. Flow would be something like: “click to add a thing to this page” -> select inputs or output types (similar to the API “initialize calls” popup window layout) -> click ok -> the editor creates all the selected elements on the page already connected to the thing in the DB.
Similar to 6, there can be a lot of time spent on programming buttons to ‘make changes to a thing’ or ‘add new thing’ workflows, the “Add all fields” button in the property editor speeds this up slightly but it would be cool if the editor could make an educated guess or have a wizard that helps speed up creation of these relationships. Like if I have a field in my thing named “first name” and an input called “first name” and both are text then the editor suggest those two be connected or more simply have a popup that displays two lists side by side, one of page elements, and the second a list of fields in a thing - I then drag items from one column over items from the other to make the connection. This would be seriously ‘no code’!

fayewatson · August 18, 2020, 5:43am

Thank you so much for the great suggestions @duke.severn and @paul.dalpozzo! Your suggestions have been added as numbers 63 - 67!

Note: There were a few that were already in the list, so that is the only reason why all weren’t added to the list.

@paul.dalpozzo Just to double-check, when you select the images and change the widths, do you then click the “Apply these changes to these elements” button after adjusting the height and width values? Sometimes it takes 1 or 2 clicks on the “Apply these changes…” button for the changes to be applied. If this is not occurring, it might be worth filing a bug report just to be sure: https://bubble.io/bug_report

@paul.dalpozzo I would have added this but Bubble has previously mentioned that it is not possible to do this even if Bubble wanted to add “open in a new tab” as a workflow action. Currently, there is a similar workaround that allows you to tie workflows to a link element though: Trigger workflow when link is clicked - #10 by fayewatson

fayewatson · August 18, 2020, 6:14am

Here are a few more! (now 68 - 73)

Have the group element’s “Collapse this element’s height when hidden” setting checked by default since this is usually checked.
Add the ability to set a standard group element to become a floating group through a conditional. For example, in most messaging apps, there is a group on the page which contains a multiline input for the user to write a new message. At mobile page widths, this group needs to float to the bottom of the user’s phone for a better UX. If we could set a group to float through a conditional/property change that would save time and eliminate the need to create different UIs for desktop and mobile.
The option to temporarily turn off the “please refresh this page” option in development mode, and allow each Bubble developer to test just the page that they’re working on (e.g. ?refreshoff=true). When two collaborators are working on different pages in the same development version, this would allow each collaborator to preview their page’s changes without needing to reload the page each second, due to the other developer’s changes.
The ability to move two elements that are within different groups at the same time.
The ability to import/export a single page (with all of its elements, workflows, and data types). This would save a lot of time from having to fix many errors when copying and pasting with workflows.
The ability to auto-generate a single-page for mobile apps, after selecting multiple pages. Each page would be copied into the new single-page with all of its workflows, stacked vertically. There may be a few errors to fix but this would save time from having to manually copy each page and its workflows into the single page.

paul.dalpozzo · August 18, 2020, 4:44pm

Cool! Glad some were helpful, super excited to see Bubble evolve.

Thanks for the info on the “apply the changes…” button did not see that it was there. FYI - One thing to note, I just tried it (and worked perfectly) but when I clicked the button the property editor disappeared. I have it locked. When I went into the “grids and borders” menu unclicked-and-reclicked “Lock Property Editor” the editor came back. I can add it as a bug but maybe you can get it in faster.

Thanks for the info on the new tab work around!

Cheers!