Bubble is continuously evolving and making improvements. Last month the platform launched 2 new features and started work on native looping support. Read on to find out how the new features work and what its new support initiative is all about.

Experimental Design Feature

Bubble has a new experimental feature that you can enable called an “Experimental Design Canvas”. The main purpose of this feature is to boost website performance in pages with large numbers of elements.

The general gist of this change is that they’ve changed up their system from jQuery (imperative) to SolidJS (reactive). The main effect of this is to reduce the amount of pre-rendering. It also enables the ability to expand/resize the elements tree display in the editor.

Early testing has also shown that it has performance boosting effects in the editor itself, especially on the property editor interface which is known to occasionally get very laggy.

Naturally, this is an experimental feature, so it can be enabled in the “version” tab of Bubble’s Settings. Expect to run into bugs while using this feature and report them on the Bubble forums so that they can be fixed up.

Detach Reusable Element

A small and niche change in Bubble, but still definitely a useful one to know about is Bubble's Detach Reusable Element.

This basically lets you turn a copy of a reusable element on a page into an element on the page itself. it integrates most of its functionality directly into the page. However there aren’t many use cases for doing this, as reusable components are generally good practice to use.

This also comes with some limitations involving repeating groups:

- If the element was attached to a repeating group and has workflow events in it, the workflow will now “belong” to the page itself and may have issues interacting with certain triggers, such as “X seconds” and “When button inside repeating group is clicked”.

- If the reusable element contains a popup and is detached from a repeating group, any data that would normally be sent into the popup via the repeating group won’t be automatically re-wired to support the new format of the elements being part of the page, as such, you’ll need to reset these up yourself.

The same also happens if the reusable element contains a group focus.So it’s advised to be extra careful when using this on a reusable item within a repeating group that contains one of the above elements.

It’s not a hugely useful change, but we're sure you’ll eventually run into something where you’ll be glad to be able to do this.

Bubble begins work on native looping support

If you’re any way familiar with Bubble, you’ll know that looping through items in a list is a rather clunky function to implement, requiring setting up back-end workflows and scheduling them on lists. While this does do what is needed, troubleshooting these workflows is awkward as you’ll need to dig through the server logs to try to find what the issue at hand is.

However, from this Tweet by Jared Gibb, we can see that Bubble is starting to collect User feedback on a new functionality called “Native Looping”.

Now, not a tonne is currently known about this feature, as it’s still very early days. But from the sounds of it, it’ll allow you to iterate through a list of items on the client side, instead of the server side, or at the very least, provide the innate ability to handle writing multiple items instead of setting up convoluted back-end systems.

Having any commonly done function turned into a natively supported feature is always a boon, as it tends to reduce the margin for errors and simplifies the process of setting these flows up. I for one am excited to see where this might lead, and have my fingers crossed that this feature doesn’t see delays in release down the line.