I’m hoping I can spark a discussion of Bubble’s ability to create an “infinite document” of nested documents as is done in WorkFlowy.
If you’re not familiar with it, WorkFlowy, to my mind, is fundamentally more like an outliner than a document maker. But I’m just getting started with it. Hopefully a few skilled Bubblers also know WorkFlowy well enough to provide some insights.
Here’s part of WorkFlowy’s default first page:
My experience tells me this cannot be done in a way that would come even close to the performance of WorkFlowy. And I’m extremely leery about the potential cost considering Bubble’s new workload pricing. Infinitely scalable? Every bullet is also a document? Expandable at any level, and detachable for viewing any bullet as its own document.
But am I wrong?
Putting my skepticism aside, the first place I would look is database structure. But maybe it’s wrong to even consider the database until you understand what the UI must be capable of.
Any thoughts before I try putting more words into this topic?
This may be a nice light read about this topic:
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Thanks. I’ve scanned this and will give it a more thorough reading, but I’m already doubtful that Notion’s model and UI can reasonably be built in Bubble (and perform well). Am I off base on that?
What do you think the limitations would be? I can’t imagine it’d be easy, but with some persistance I would think you can make a Notion-like product within Bubble.
Thanks for the question, @2706mason.
First, please understand that I signed up for Bubble six years ago on the “no code” promise. I’m still expecting that to hold up, and I’ve done my best with Bubble for six years. But I am not a coder. If I must become one, I don’t think I’d want to learn inside Bubble.
That said, a glance at the Notion data model description suggests, from what I recall of my old experience with HTML and its children, that it is using something like XML to dynamically describe data structure. (Could that be the mysterious JSON I see popping up in this forum?) This would suggest that rendering must be dynamic. And by the same token, any work done in the UI to add items to the data structure would require dynamic support in Bubble that I don’t know is available.
My experience with Bubble is that infinite nesting, expanding, etc., and dynamic creation of new data types is not supported at all. Bubble’s no-code paradigm relies on the data model being bound to the workflows and UI. Am I wrong on that? I’ve done expanding and collapsing with a limited number of nested things, but to support infinite nesting? . . . I just don’t see it.
Looking at it from the UI/UX perspective, I don’t have a clue of how to make such expanding and nesting happen in the responsive page design paradigm, or even the legacy responsive engine.
There’s more to the problem, at least as I see it in WorkFlowy (I haven’t worked with the Notion UI.) What about tags and nearly instantaneous searching, with their attendant dynamic expansion to show only the appropriate levels in the outline?
So, as a confirmed “no code” Bubbler, I don’t have any idea how to make this happen without going way beyond the native capabilities of Bubble.
