Making templates for pages, sections, buttons, functions

Feature Requests
1

I feel this is the next “frontier” for us…

We spend hundreds of hours building an app, fine tuning pages, functions, elements, etc. But at the moment you better know where to build it, because moving “things” to other pages isn’t easy. Actually, in most instances it isn’t possible at all. I can move things between tabs on a page but I have not come across any methods to move elements to other pages.

Of course you can duplicate a page or even an app as a starting point . And while that works, it’s a sometimes crude process.

So, this isn’t a specific ask but more a focus on future challenges for us. We don’t use Noloco for clients but our own company. This means we build apps that all connect back to the same data in Airtable. This makes our ask a bit “easier”, as we want to reconnect to the same bases, tables and fields over and over.

Obviously building elements and copying them to other places in the app or even other apps might entail disconnecting them from their source for the time being. And then I might want to “copy” a page just because I have established a certain design and UI layout that I want to establish across an app and other apps (templates). And then I might connect that page to a completely different data set. So, yes, I know it is tricky.

Building Templates: This is the first step for us and I know this has been mentioned before. This ranges from action buttons to entire pages and yes should extend across apps. We view all our apps as “from the same source”, therefore it would be really helpful to start seeing settings, toolsets and templates that can be created app independent and then be applied to apps.

I would love to hear how other users feel about this and how they would like to approach this to make their building experience more efficient.

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2

Thanks for this post, I have to say I fully agree.

I think what you can do with noloco is very much impressive but I also think that the building process itself is unfortunately not great at all.

Apart from an overall very cumbersome building experience I think the fact that there are zero options for templates of any kind really limits the usability of Noloco.
I guess it works well for small apps with limited amounts of screens but once you go over a certain size, it just becomes utter chaos and takes up way too much time.

I’m only working on one App but that app has probably 30-40 pages plus a similar amount of record pages and maintaining it efficiently is impossible.

For me personally, the biggest pain point are action buttons and record buttons. Those make up a huge part of the overall functionality but the fact that you cannot save them as a template is incredibly frustrating. Ideally I want a “add Task” Button in probably 100 different places within my app. But apart from having to build the thing 100 times, I’d also have to change 100 instances manually if I ever change something.

Same for Templates of Views. A well made View with the right filters, Buttons and Icons makes all the difference. But it takes a lot of time. And once again, you cannot maintain them at all.

In the end, there is little consistency within the app, because realistically, you cannot spend half a day updating every view once you made a change to one of them.

I understand that anything template related is probably a lot of work and not easily implemented. But at the same time it feels like this functionality would elevate Noloco to a whole new Level in terms of usability.

The lack of templates is also on of the reasons I am not offering other clients custom Apps at this point. Development and especially maintenance just takes too much time and is too frustrating.

And while its obviously a lot of work, I’d argue that things like simple templates for Buttons and views without overwrites are relatively straight forward in terms of how they could work.
Instance Specific overwriting of certain fields etc would probably be quite important too but even a very simple template would make things much easier.

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3

Thank you for that lengthy reply. I totally agree with everything you say. I guess I don’t experience it quite that extremely, because I “only” build for our company. But I do experience it all the same.

Reading through your thoughts and reflecting on my own building experience, it feels that there are two main areas that would be a start of building relief:

  • Design choices / element styles
  • Buttons

In a way the core of this particular challenge lies in the app and the development style of the app itself. There are a constantly growing number of options of elements and functions. And while they are needed and always more than welcome the keep compounding said issue. And in a way my apps are like a history of Noloco development. My early apps have near zero of today’s functions because I simply can not revisit everything to update. This is of course a personal time availability problem, as revisiting old stuff would be a natural part of ongoing app development.

I guess my bottom line for @darragh is this: Any place at all where you can start venturing into this area of changeable, self updating templates would be welcomed with open arms on my end.

1 Like
4

Bump bump bump it up…

I couldn’t agree more.

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