My First Bubble Plugin Story and Tips for plugin builders

Tips
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Building our first Bubble plugin, an Elastic Search integration, was an adventure embarked upon with my friend @kshitij.ingle . Our journey began while we were developing a catalog site using Bubble. We quickly realized the platform’s limitations regarding search functionality; none of the available plugins offered the seamless search experience we envisioned. This gap inspired us to create something better.

Determined to enhance the user experience on our own terms, we delved into the development of an Elastic Search plugin. Our aim was straightforward: to provide Bubble users with a powerful, efficient search tool that would effortlessly sift through data, ensuring that users could find exactly what they were looking for with minimal fuss.

Our efforts bore fruit when we onboarded our first client. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, validating our belief in the necessity of our plugin. Their satisfaction not only served as a testament to the plugin’s effectiveness but also fueled our passion for innovation within the Bubble ecosystem.

As we look to the future, our experience with developing the Elastic Search plugin has been immensely enlightening. We’re excited about the potential of creating more Bubble plugins, driven by a desire to continually enhance and streamline the user experience for everyone in the Bubble community.

Some tips that I would like to share to fellow Plugin builders:

  • Read the documentation thoroughly and make sure you have a fair idea of how things around bubble work

  • Don’t hesitate to reach out to the Bubble community for any help.

  • Find an early adopter who can help you find bugs and minor fixes at an early stage. In our case, @sepehr.online tremendously helped us in improving our plugin.

  • Keep polishing your plugin according to the feedback as well the current requirements.

Link to our plugin page: Elastic Search

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Wish I had a story like this for each plugin I made…

:slight_smile:
Hope it all works out!

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Thanks for sharing this, it has been incredible collaborating with you on this plugin, @alvin_r !

I want to reiterate your 3rd tip - this was the single most important step in improving the integration. At least 8 bugs were fixed during this collaboration.

Hope this post helps and inspires other plugin builders on Bubble!

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@GH5T Wishing you luck as well!

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Great thank you for sharing your insights. That is always very valuable.

My question is how does your plugin fit in the market where we already have available some other search plugins and services like Algolia? What problem does it solve exactly?

Cheers :wink:

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Hi,

Enjoyed the read so had to give it a try. Didn’t work for me at the moment. :disappointed:

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image1284×1913 110 KB

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Hey @hi_bubble , Thanks for your reply :smile:
I would like to share some of the advantages of Elastic Search over Algolia :

  • Elastic Search can be self hosted via Elastic Cloud which gives users more control over deployment and security.

  • Elastic Search is highly customisable compared to Algolia.

  • The design around Elastic Search is to handle large volumes of data and complex queries. From my usage, I don’t think any other search solution comes close to it.

Please do check out our demo page now as we’ve fixed it: Link

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Hi @gnelson, we have fixed the demo page. Do check it out!
Elastic Search Demo