This is something that I cover in my Stripe Integration Course.
This course was setup for real world use. Providing the student the ability to learn a lot more beyond just the APIs necessary to use Stripe. Little pro tricks in their for how to convert data from an API provider to be recognized properly by Bubble, how to paginate through API data and more.
I would say that as an educator, there is a need to decide on who is your target audience when designing the course, and the strong likelihood is that the courses you have come across were probably designed to be for a beginning and the more advanced topics of backend workflows might not have been suitable.
I taught English as a second language for a decade, and the topics covered regarding the English Language courses were graded according to the students level. In a beginner English language course, it wouldn’t be appropriate to cover topics like Past Perfect Continuous grammatical structures. Bubble is a language of it’s own, and I think the same applies here.
From what I have seen offered by others, there are not too many courses designed to be for intermediate or advanced users…very well could be due to the market demand; seems pretty slim and probably not worth the investment for the educator to create such courses. You can however find many tutorials that do cover some advanced topics or provide those little gems that only a true Bubble expert can provide.
I personally don’t see any way that Bubble can try to standardized 3rd party products. Tutorials are created by individuals or companies who are completely separate from Bubble as an entity. In regards to templates, that would just restrict the number of templates available. Some templates might be created to be more of a visual template and don’t have all the workflows setup, others may be trying to strike a balance between functionality and price.
If you want to take a look at some templates that are very robust in their functionality take a look at these.
I built all of these templates to be completely functional applications. In fact, the Skillup template is the template version of my own application I built for my own use, so it has all the advanced functionality that an expert would put into their own applications.
The main issue as to why template developers will not put as much effort into the development of a template is that Bubble restricts the price of a template to $500 or less. If Bubble were to lift that restriction and allow a developer to price templates above this, then you will start to find more templates that are completely functional applications ready to go out of the box.
Of course though, templates are built my individuals or companies who need to decide how they want to invest their resources (time) in return for payment. Building a template, if built out just like a real app, would take a considerable amount of time, that could have been spent building an app for a client paying thousands of dollars.
In the end, tutorials, courses and templates are products sold by 3rd parties. As with the purchase of any product, Buyer should Beware and due their own due diligence. In regards to templates, the Preview function of the template should be utilized and the potential purchaser should spend the time required to play with it and see the functionality it has before making a decision.
I advise all of my students not to buy a template to learn from it as a beginner. They are not learning tools for the most part. I do recommend to install a free template that has some functionality you are looking to implement as a learning resource, but there are not many instances where it makes sense to buy a template to learn from it.
Same for me. I just chopped it up to a topic that wasn’t covered. I would have been disappointed if it were advertised as covering backend workflows and it didn’t. In my case the course didn’t advertise covering the topic, so it not being covered was not an issue for me.
I actually didn’t start to use backend workflows until about 6 months into my time on Bubble, and still didn’t understand the best use case and ways to utilize them until a year or more later.
I’ve got 3.5 years and still learn something new everyday. Whether that be from other experts who have left gems of knowledge on the forum that I came across when I was searching for such related topics or from me attempting something new after theorizing on the impacts and testing it out.
One of the best parts of Bubble for me, is the challenge and coming up with a way to solve a complex issue or coming up with a simple way to solve a system wide issue.
As you continue to develop your Bubble skills, perhaps you can tackle some of the issues you discussed in this post.