When I began building my app, I created pages with functionality that I have decided won’t be a part of the MVP launch but will get released later.
I don’t want to delete these pages and lose all that work, especially since I’ll be finishing them and launching them later, but I also don’t want them to be published with the live app.
How should I handle pages that I want to stay in “Development” and not exist at all in the “Live” app?
Is it possible to delete or edit pages in the live app (my understanding is that you can’t)?
For #1, I have considered redirects if the current user is not an admin, but that’s honestly not an ideal solution for me and makes SEO a headache once the pages are ready to go live.
Also, if it helps to know, I’m currently on the Personal plan, so I’m limited to 1 Dev environment.
Hi there, @samnichols… as it seems like you already know, there really isn’t a great answer for you here. When you deploy development to live, any and all pages in development are going to be deployed to live, and there is no way to delete or edit the pages in live. It’s really about making sure users can’t access the pages (or parts of pages) that aren’t ready for prime time yet via redirects or by simply not making the pages accessible through any sort of navigation in the app.
The above being said, one thought does come to mind, though. I guess you could copy the app so you would have a “backup” that has the extra pages, and then you could delete them from your main app. However, that might be a lot more trouble than it’s worth when you try to copy those pages back into your main app at some point down the line, so I’m not sure if I would go that route.
Perhaps rename them before they’re ready for prime time. If you use Bubble’s built-in methods for referencing a page (e.g. Go to page action or Link elements), those references won’t break, as Bubble maintains its own internal reference ids for pages (and elements more generally).
Also, consider putting everything on the page into a main group that’s hidden by default and then showing that group only if the page is accessed by the admin user and/or if it’s not the live version of the app. That way, users stumbling upon the page won’t see it partially rendered before being redirected.
Appreciate the response, Mike! Yeah, it’s definitely a downside of the learning curve when building with Bubble, especially if you’re used to WordPress where changes can be made on the live site when needed. I guess I’ll just do redirects and hope for the best with SEO once those pages are ready for launch. Was hoping to avoid the hassle of getting SEs to index pages that formerly had 301s, but I’ll have to deal with it I guess.
