Templates versus plugins and the blending of the two

Questions
1

@emmanuel

Coming from CMS systems like Wordpress, there’s typically three main parts of an application.

  1. Templates - which are usually what define the visual look, and could include additional functionality.
  2. Plugins - add additional functionality and could include additional pages as needed by the plugin, but would inherit the visual look of the template (i.e. Header, Footer, or other defined content sections).
  3. Core - The main functionality of the CMS

So I’m trying to understand how the concepts of Templates and Plugins will work with Bubble.

If someone purchases a template, are they able to purchase another template without overriding the first template, or is it only one template at a time?

In the future I would like to create plugins that would consist of pages and functionality that could be packaged together. Is this something on the road map for the plugin system or is there another way we could accomplish this?

For instance, maybe someone buys a template for a Real Estate website that gives their app a specific look and feel, and then they want/need an IDX plugin to pull data from their MLS for the real estate listings in their area. This plugin would specify specific pages to display the real estate listings along with the logic to integrate with their MLS and pull the data.

1 Like
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So right now Templates are very much like in WP, but Plugins are what they’re described as at bubble.is/plugins (“elements on the page, sources of data (APIs) or actions in your workflows”). So an analogy with WP isn’t perfect, because these are not concepts they have.

The plugins you’re talking about are more like our experiment with Element Templates. Basically a way to add more than one elements at once with some workflows. I know some people have asked that, and we’d like to push the experiment there, but we want to push for plugins first.

3

Thank you sir. I will wait with bated breath. :slight_smile:

4

It will be interesting to see what you do Kfawcett, it has to be better than the options at Placester