Request for feedback: What 3rd party integrations are missing?

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Hi all,

I briefly introduced myself on another thread, but for those who didn’t see it, my name is Allen and I’m the new PM at Bubble. Super excited to be here and to meet many of you who help create such a great community!

One of the advantages of working on a product that has such a fervent community is that I get to ask you all for feedback and ideas :). So here’s my first try at it:

What are some 3rd party integrations that are missing today which would be helpful to you?

Many of these could take the form of plugins (though not necessarily all!). Feel free to toss names out here - though including a 1-2 sentence explanation for why the integration would be helpful (especially for the more esoteric ones) would be appreciated too.

(Necessary PM caveat: can’t commit to build any particular idea which may pop up here, but I am / we are certainly listening to this feedback!)

Thanks!
Allen

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Hey @allenyang,

Live video chat because its tough to implement at the moment. An easy plugin or integration would be great.

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PWA support without messing around with json files and service workers.
Action to add to homescreen, cache pages for offline etc. Something I’m implementing tonight but seems tedious.

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Something “third party” would be bitly plugin, https://dev.bitly.com/v4_documentation.html
Allow my users to connect their bitly accounts for tracking share links within the app.

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Hi @allenyang! :wave:

Below are some initial things that come to mind after working with a bunch of business-focused apps. I know there are some APIs, workarounds, and plugins already out there to help, but most of the time I just wish this stuff was built-in to keep things a little less Frankenstein.

Also, these items are less about a specific 3rd party platform and more about the fact that I often turn to 3rd parties to get these features.

Charts
The Bubble plugin only does one series and you can’t customize the colors. This is a super basic plugin that I see folks abandoning quickly the moment they want to customize any part of how it looks. A multi-series option with full control over axis labels, min/max, steps, etc. would go a really long way for apps with reporting dashboards.

Again, I know there are other plugins and if you’re sorta comfortable with HTML/CSS you can grab code from Google charts (or AMCharts, HighCharts, etc.) to keep moving forward, but really wish there was more baked in here.

Web Push Notifications
OneSignal seems to be the favorite, so it would be killer to have a more direct way to involve the API and do targeted notifications to users/devices.

Any app that wants to send an update to its users would benefit: marketplaces, apps with in-app messaging, social network type apps, etc.

HTML Emails
Many Bubblers are using Sendgrid templates for this, but it would be so nice to have a way to design emails out of the box so that dynamic data (text, images, etc.) is easier to manage.

With HTML Emails you’d be able to:

  • Send more professional-looking branded emails
  • Add tables to emails (e.g. questionnaire results)
  • Clickable buttons (e.g. “Click here to confirm”)

That’s all I’ve got for now!

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I agree for all that. But +++ for Emails including attachments.

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+1 for the Charts mentioned by @romanmg

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Welcome Allen :slight_smile:

I think individual third party integrations are not as important as the infrastructure around integration. APIs can change rapidly, and often the integrator doesn’t understand the nuances. Quite a few of the Bubble plugins are broken and ignore key features e.g. you provide a Google auth, but no method of getting the token refreshed when it expires.

If you ARE going to publish plugins then you need to commit to maintaining them. Or at least open-source them properly. There are lots of people who would contribute to this.

OAUTH2 - uncouple from the Bubble signup. So many OAUTH integrations are nothing to do with Social Login (as an example, Bitly mentioned above) and the hack to get it to work in native bubble is a pain as I have to store tokens. Also, provide a native mechanism for token refresh. Actually, as I have said for many years, just outsource it all to Auth0.

DATA - whilst it is great to have you and Erik on board, data manipulation in Bubble is, and always has been, very very poor and is so much higher up my list than having an evangelist. Uploading data, downloading data, even just getting to our data in the first place is far too hard. The data APIs were an afterthought - and have not been touched in years. Give us the ability to integrate third party data tools into our data. Or even roll our own - if you provided data access at scale, I guarantee you someone will build a front end editor.

API connector - this has always needed a rethink, particularly around arrays and lists. It is also too proprietary, make it more like Postman or cURL - see the recent spotify API thread - you have to guess at how Bubble is handling various formats and just fiddle until it works.

Server Side plugins - the integration with NPM opens up a HUGE array of possibilities, but it is a bit messy at the moment and I just fall back to webtask.

TL:DR

IMO what we don’t need is more plugins, what we need is the environment in which we can access TP modules, data and services in a robust and friendly environment.

And absolutely top of the list is data access from outside the ecosystem.

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PWA as mentioned above
and charts that are super custom for example gradiant lines ability to custom the data points and the tag.

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I’m very new to bubble but I’m deeply invested in it now! Because of that some of these may already be possible but here goes:

  1. HTML emails.
    It seems crazy that this doesn’t exist! I would love a WYSIWYG editor that my users could access to send emails from my app.

  2. Ability for my users to Embed parts of my bubble app on their sites like forms etc

  3. White label CNAME control for my users.
    If done the right way this could be a great revenue stream for Bubble because the cost of white label would be passed into the user. The worst thing to do would be to restrict this to a higher plan… having a billing system on a per user basis would allow startups with very few clients to generate MRR for bubble.

  4. Endpoint improvements.
    Currently we can only post, we should be able to GET, DELETE etc allowing us more functionality. From my understanding we can’t oEmbed because of this limitation.

  5. Horizontal width collapse.
    I tried to build a banner that included conditional fields. However I had to abandon the idea because there is no option to collapse the width of a hidden item. I don’t understand why this isn’t possible considering we already have collapse height.

I’m sure that others will have better and more technical suggestions but these are the issues that I’m currently facing.

As I mentioned above, I am new on the bubble scene so if some of these are already possible then apologies in advance :slight_smile:

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Integration of Paypal would be nice!

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Oh yes !

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Not a third party integration, but I’d love to have scrollable containers as a native implementation in Bubble.

The two main use cases I have personally had:

  • A fixed height block that has more text than the height of the element allows for. The user would be able to independently scroll within this block to see all the text without scrolling the entire page or expanding the size of the block.
  • a horizontal repeating group that has more columns than the width of the container. In my use case, think of a spreadsheet that needs to keep things one row, such as a student attendance chart. Each student has a row, and the columns are dates. I want to be able to scroll left and right within this repeating group without having to have a mega wide fixed group page.

It’s likely that both of these cases are possible with html elements, but that defeats the purpose for a no code platform IMO

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  • HTML Emails

  • Simple Chat Integration

  • Video Chat Integration

  • Better plugin and template management. There’s a lot of trash on both of those marketplaces that makes bubble look cheap (and not the good kind of cheap)

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Thank you all for the feedback so far; please keep it coming!

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Not really a 3rd part request but it would be nice if default alert could be aligned to the bottom too

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Hi @allenyang,

Integration of Jasonelle and Bubble as a plugin (Native construct of Bubble).

ref: Native your app with Jasonelle in 10 min.

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+1 perfectly brought to the point.

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Advancement on charts would be a huge plus!

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I would love to have advanced chart plugins. You can do mathematical and statistical calculations but there is no easy built in tool to present them. Imagine that is possible that’s whole new concept. And new opportunities will open. @romanmg @timgarrett111

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