Bubble Feature Release - Summer 2016

We hope everyone had a great summer (or winter for the Bubblers in the Southern Hemisphere). We’ve been quite busy at Bubble, with an entirely new, more reliable and more scalable backend, and some other features/improvements. Here is what we’ve been up to since June.

New backend and ability to restore backups

We’ve entirely upgraded our database system and moved from Elasticsearch to Postgres. This provides us with a more scalable backend, and offers faster searches and loading time.

Part of this migration lets us offer everyone the ability to restore an app database to an earlier version. If something goes wrong, you can now get back to an earlier version of your data (to the second). How far you can go depends on your plan; it goes from 7 days for users on a free plan to 90 days for users on our Team plan (this can be infinite if you are on a dedicated hosting plan).

Draggable and droppable elements

This is an exciting plugin addition, as it opens a lot of possibilities in terms of what you can do with Bubble! You can now add draggable elements, that users can drag around, and make them droppable, in which case this can trigger a workflow. This lets you do a lot: if you think about Tinder in a Bubble way, a workflow is triggered when a draggable picture is dropped on one of 2 drop areas, like and dislike…

To use this, just install the plugin ‘Draggable Elements’ to your app. It’ll add 2 new elements to your app, a draggable element and a dropzone. Combining these two elements, you’ll be able to give a more interactive feel to your app (see this for more about this). Here is a Trello-like dashboard built on Bubble.

Bubble Shop

This one is a bit different from the other things. It started as some users were asking a few months ago whether we had some T-Shirts to help promote Bubble. And we didn’t. As a bootstrapped startup, very product- and community-focused, marketing is not something we had focused on as much so far.

After a successful experiment, we put together this Bubble Shop where you can buy such gear. We’ve tried to come up with something that promotes the No-Code movement in a fun way. We’re not taking any margin on these sales, and while we don’t expect this to become the next Zara or H&M, we hope this will be a fun way for our users to show that they are members of the Bubble Community. We hope you enjoy wearing them!

Other improvements

We’ve added a lot of other things over the summer. If you follow the forum you’ll see the whole list of announcements, but here is in a nutshell:

• Authentication with Twitter: you can now add a ‘Sign up with Twitter’ button to your app and fetch the user’s Twitter timeline.
• SEO optimization: Bubble apps now automatically expose a robots.txt file and you can pick which page should be added to the sitemap.xml file.
• Connect two Bubble apps: this lets you access another app’s database and run some workflows from another app. This is useful if you start building complex systems.
• Microsoft SQL: this one is for Enterprise Clients. If you’re running on MSSQL you can read and write data to it with the DB Connector.
• UX improvements to the Expression Composer and ability to run an app as a user for debugging purposes.

Thank you for building on Bubble

It’s great to see our community grow and help each other on the Forum. More and more apps are looking better every day, we’re grateful to have your trust and are excited to see what you can come up with on Bubble.