How to integrate something like Intercom?

[petit-ricard]

Hey,

I am building something similar to Intercom. I want founders to integrate it on their sites.

Basically an icon on the top right will give access to my product feature to users.

Is it possible to do something like that ?

Thanks

[ryanellman]

That may be difficult to build using only bubble. Bubble is great for building your own web app but it would be difficult to include features of your app in other people’s websites. I don’t know if this is possible but the only way I could think of doing this would maybe to have your users include your website as an iframe in their sites. Or you could use bubble as a back end to handle user sign up, management, payment processing, etc. and then hand code the features you are describing and make API calls to connect the two.

I may be missing something however, because I don’t have experience doing something like this so maybe one of the other bubblers here has a good insight on how this could be done. Good luck!

[seanhoots]

In theory you can but the way you plan to embed it will determine its possibility or not.
Practically its going to be hard to do it in plain bubble without some javascript for the frontend UI widget.
If it was a simple inline embed widget i could see how you could do that with plain bubble in an iframe.

You could create the backend and host the messages with bubble.

The challenge will be the frontend UI widget.
You can’t open a popup from an iframe.

So its going to be hard and maybe almost impossible to have that icon floating on the page without some extra javascript file the user has to load.

@keith built a saas calendar widget in bubble. You can read more about his process and maybe learn something from that.

Hybrid sites: "embed" Bubble in other websites

Oh hai: My ears are burning… Thanks for the @ mentions… Indeed, my app grupz.com (among other things) generates widgets that can be embedded on other sites. This is done via iFrames. In terms of making things embed nicely, you have to construct embed code for your users that does the right thing. Unfortunately, they do sometimes mess it up. I’ve also posted about trying to add embed.ly support for my widgets, but I’ve not got it working yet. (That would ultimately make embedding our widgets mo…

[keith]

And, BTW, I’ve not built a cool thing like Intercom, but would you believe that, at the end of the day, widgets like that actually DO use iFrames? It seems to be true. (And it’s the only way to do cross-domain stuff like this anyway, so that shouldn’t surprise us.)

I’ve looked at several articles (none of which are wildly specific about how to build things like this and so I’ve not felt like pursuing it much), but basically embedded script things that float nifty elements above the page are eventually creating an iFrame.

(You can see this by inspecting such pages.)

So, you conceivably COULD deliver a Bubble page thing inside of an overlay popup like Intercom or Freshchat does.

Of course the coding of the overlay dealy-bobber is not something you can do in Bubble. You would have to use your mad JS skillz for that.

(I did run across a somewhat simple Git repository with a shell for such a widget, but again this is something I haven’t pursued. I don’t need such a thing so to do that would be more of an academic exercise — but it would be cool to demonstrate.)