Monthly Community Update -- December 2023

Announcements
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Hi all,

This is our December community update! Read last month’s update here.

We had some exciting improvements ship this month, including a speed boost for popular data actions like Make changes to a list of things and the launch of the responsive breakpoints project. More on those below.

Before I dive in, just a quick reminder for plugin creators to make sure to update any plugins with server-side actions to Plugin API v4 as soon as possible. As of this past Monday, plugins that haven’t been updated have been delisted from the marketplace; soon they will be marked as “deprecated” in the plugins tab of the editor as well. (And if you’ve recently submitted a new version of a plugin, just know that it may take a bit longer than usual for the version to be reviewed, given the high volume of requests.)

For plugin users, you’ll have until March 12 to transition away from deprecated plugins with server-side actions before those plugins stop working. More information on this coming soon!

Changes we made this month

Product changes

As I mentioned, we made big speed improvements for some of our most popular data actions. Make changes to a list of things, Delete a list of things, and the delete button in the app data tab are all now 3x faster, and the row limit for the workflow action Upload data as CSV is now 10x larger. Exciting stuff, with more data action improvements to come down the line.

We also launched custom responsive breakpoints! This should make managing your responsive design much easier. You can now add and name, edit, and delete your own custom breakpoints or choose from our preexisting presets for mobile, tablet, and desktop. You can also modify the pixel value for your default layout.

In addition to a few smaller fixes detailed in the changelog, we released two big rounds of updates for our expression composer beta in response to your feedback, including:

A few other small but important updates and bug fixes ‌that shipped:

  • To give you more control over when and where you use the issue checker, we added a toggle to let you choose whether to run the issue checker over backend workflows.
  • You can now use “is in” everywhere you can use “is not in” to search for whether an item is contained within a list
  • If you were having trouble using OAuth-ing into your sub-app because of a “no private key created” error, that’s been fixed
  • We now properly pass in the content type you specify in the header whenever you’re making an API call, and we fixed a bug that arose when rounding a number to three decimals using the “formatted as” operator

We also made a change to the checkout experience to help you choose the most cost-effective subscription for your app. The system now dynamically recommends a certain workload tier if adding it on would save you money (vs paying for overages).

Other changes

As I’ve mentioned in the past, we recently improved some internal processes to help us better respond to incidents that affect more than one app, including changing our protocol for defining severity. That means the number of incidents reported on the status page has risen lately, but don’t be alarmed — we aren’t seeing more incidents, we’re just posting to the status page more consistently. Since I responded in this thread, we’ve retroactively updated several incidents’ reported severity levels to align with the actual impact they caused.

If you haven’t yet, check out the new Bask plugin for VS code (an SDK), which makes the process of creating Bubble plugins in VS code much faster and easier.

You may have noticed that we updated the look and feel (via the version of Discourse running under the hood) here on the forum. This change also unblocked a variety of new plugins and features we’re excited to start implementing on our end — more to come — and enabled us to restore comment threads on blog posts. Head to the blog to start a conversation about anything you’ve read recently, including the replays of all the BubbleCon sessions!

And last but definitely not least: We now have a set of practice questions you can use to help prep for the Bubble Developer Certification. Head over to this section of the certification page to download them!

What we’re working on

  • AI for Bubble: The AI team conducted their first round of usability testing on AI-generated pages! Next they’re working to incorporate user feedback and testing out a new approach to our model.
  • Native mobile apps: The team is making good progress on the foundational engineering work here, and they’ll be breaking ground on editor-facing work by the end of the year.
  • Improving page load performance: Work is ongoing! The team is currently making some changes that will help reduce unnecessary code sent to the web browser.
  • UX of the editor: Now that custom responsive breakpoints have shipped, the team is working on refreshing the design and usability of the Styles tab.
  • Logs: The team that just released improvements to popular data actions is now working on updates that will provide clearer, more detailed log messages for actions that work with lists of things.
  • App Plan tab: We’re working on redesigning this tab to make it more straightforward to change plans and manage workload tiers, overages, file storage, and plugin subscriptions.
  • Workload: We’re close to rolling out the change that keeps you from incurring workload for partially executed actions.
  • Reinforcing our foundation: The team is currently working on projects related to source mapping, typifying files, and implementing LeanJS (the more modern JavaScript bundler I’ve mentioned in previous months).

Other exciting news

A big congratulations to our first 100 Bubble-Certified Developers! You can check out the list of these high-achieving Bubble experts here — then send them a note of congrats (and/or hire them for your next project!).

Speaking of professional Bubble Developers, you may have noticed a new name in your inbox: What’s Bubbling! Our new monthly newsletter just for pro devs hit inboxes mid-month, and the next edition will land in a few weeks. If you’re a freelancer, agency developer, or otherwise make a living building apps for clients and did not get the newsletter, make sure you’re subscribed at What’s Bubbling | Bubble.

And for those Spotify fans out there, stay tuned — a #BubbleWrapped roundup is coming to active users’ inboxes.

From the Bubble Blog

A few weeks ago, we published our top 5 favorite moments from BubbleCon, including a fun 60-second video full of clips from the event. If you were there, can you spot yourself?

Check out the profile of the four all-star Bubble Developers who help our certification team make the exam the best it can be by serving on our Certification Advisory Council.

And finally, don’t miss Account Manager Alicia’s employee spotlight Q&A — her adorable dog, Mozzarella, makes an appearance.

Team updates

We welcomed one new hire to the team in November: ​​Chris, joining us as an email marketing associate. Welcome, Chris!

That’s it for this month! Wishing you a great December and happy year-end holidays,

Josh and Emmanuel

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Nice, the “is in” operator is in where it belongs! I’ve needed this so many times, it’s not even funny.

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Thanks for this month Updates @josh

Awesome! I just subscribed :rocket:

Excited for this one :rocket:

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Lol same. It was hard for me to say “hmm this is my exact use case”, but every now and then it would come up… So this is a nice welcome change!

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I’m a huge fan of this team. go team mobile!

But seriously, this is the biggest part of your update. Please continue to share progress here. Including what we can do to prepare for this.

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I hope the offline mode comes with this update

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Please please please allow for cherry-picking branch merge changes.

Not being able to exclude changes from a branch significantly slows down our development speed.

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Great update!

What i’m really missing @emmanuel is the ability to set reusable workflow actions on the app.

For example, being able to reference sign up from a single workflow, on all pages without using reusable elements.

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Will these work offline?

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Excited for this! Would also be great if logs for backend workflows, especially API workflows on lists of things, were improved @josh

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I hope this kinda of updates keeps on going regulary… i’ve been testing and looking for options in the market and Bubble is getting waaaay behind other solutions, price wise and performance wise, which is such a shame cuz i love Bubble, and been a lover for years now.

lets hope they wake up and keep improving.

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Isn’t this possible already with backend workflows? I mean you could just create a sign up workflow in your backend and call that action anywhere in your app.

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Awesome. Better late than never.

These small quality of life improvements are actually HUGE and really go a long long way in terms of user satisfaction and a sense that Bubble is Listening to their users and implementing the features the users are asking for.

Please try to incorporate into the mix for each month a handful of these small quality of life improvements while we continue to wait patiently for the Big Features like faster page performance and native mobile apps.

@josh I’m also wondering if maybe it would be possible to just let the AI design stuff be left up to the Design Software Platforms like Figma AI: The Next Chapter in Design | Figma Blog and instead of spending the resources for Bubble to create their own AI for design, maybe just make the Figma import feature work perfectly and in the vain of that attempt, maybe still get the benefit of the BuzzAcronym (AI) by leveraging AI to convert the elements properly (so no more shapes that should be groups).

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Stoked about the practice questions for certification! :raised_hands:

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Native Features seem promising

AI is interesting but most ai things are extremely hit or miss. I assume the ai features will be geared towards beginner bubblers, and honestly, that’s ok…

However, I do dream of the day where there’s an ai “optimize” button that goes through your app and deletes // changes unnecessary states, groups, settings, and more.

Some of our apps have so much code on them, that it’s virtually impossible to keep up with what a previous, inferior version of you did.

I’m mostly excited for page load stuff, however, it’d be nice to know exactly what kind of performance increases we can expect, given the nature of our apps.

@keith random ping but are there any third party software tricks for page-load speed in the year of our lord, 2023?

I swear to goodness I remember seeing you comment about a platform that loads up websites absolutely insanely incredibly fast, but now I can’t find the comment nor the platform

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So excited for this one!! :heart_eyes::heart_eyes::heart_eyes::heart_eyes::heart_eyes:

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Framer?

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It would be nice to have front-end capabilities with reusable models. This is widely used in low-code environments.

You would go to a workflow model to modify the content, which would then work across the app.

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Because this is Christmas soon and everybody makes a santa Claus list :
would be incredible to have a response from a backend wf :heart_eyes:
Trigger it from frontend and get parameters back instead of :

  • backend api wf with return data
  • trigger it from api call from frontend
    so need to be initialized etc

So we can move a loooooot of thing from front to back (yes our users have poor bandwith or laggy machines…)

All the annoucements are very nice !

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Basics still MUST come first…

You can just store the return data (even temporarily) in DB which will have same function, can be seamlessly setup and is much more performant than a front-end API call.