Hey Bubblers!
I wanted to hear your opinions on the available templates for Bubble supporting both desktop and mobile.
As an experienced/senior developer, I have tried Canvas and sometimes developed an application from scratch.
I found it well thought but at the same time slightly bloated in terms of performance, along with quite a learning curve to be efficient - I actually had the impression to learn another Bubble on top of Bubble. Therefore the time gain was lower than I expected, but it was my first time, so that may explain it.
My question: what’s your go-to template supporting both desktop and mobile that, as senior Bubble developer, saves you most time?
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Bumping this to the top cause I’m curious as well, but I find templates a pain because every app is different. I end up just keeping components/groups of elements available to copy/paste and modify further after that.
I would tend to think that building blocks template would be the most versatile. Any community insights?
Components over templates every time.
I’ve noticed that lots of issues new Bubblers are having are from templates they pick up that are either unoptimized, contain unnecessary plugins, not updated when Bubble optimizes with new features, does not come with good documentation or all/mix of the above.
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When first started learning I loaded up the Canvas template and I was more confused than ever because there’s 500 invisible elements on page and you can’t find anything among other issues
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I have a couple of things:
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I start most apps with a template I built for myself that has login/SPA dashboard/admin portal with user management/placeholder index page.
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I do like Frames for pasting quick UI (makes it easy to assemble decent marketing pages and repeating groups). It deals with mobile well.
Canvas is okay but I agree that it’s bloated. For example, it’s simply not acceptable to have a header that takes an extra second to load because it’s doing searches to work out what to display.
When I first started Bubble, I know I tried to build with templates, but quickly learned that once you have a template, you spend more time understanding how it works than if you’d just built it from scratch. If you want to add a new feature, good luck, because there’s probably some hidden workflow in the app that’s interfering with your data or your new feature will break and you’re not aware of it because you didn’t build it.
EDIT: Actually, I lie - I use templates on some client projects now, but not marketplace templates. Lots of my client apps are some variation of AI chatbots so I have one master template for that that I export the Bubble file-thingy for an import it into a new app. The reason I can live with that is I actually understand how the template works because I built it. It also has the advantage for me that if I add a new feature on one app I can copy and paste the the same feature into new apps and upsell the same thing to each client, and it means the client gets much cheaper + faster development.
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What’s your preferred components-template?
None since I only use my own components/templates. I’m a control freak and using someone else’s component/template freaks me out. If I do come across something i like I’ll just build my own version of it.
