Dev Day, Editor Updates and the Great Plugin Migration
First ever community-organised Dev Day
Thursday saw the first ever community-organised Bubble Dev Day. Well-known Bubblers Kelly Claus and Sarah Esteve put together a stellar line up, featuring 34 sessions and 350+ attendees. Topics covered included Scoping, A/B Testing, Getting Hired, Privacy Rules and plenty more.
For those unable to make it, there are plans to put recordings from the event on YouTube in the next few days.
We will acquire your Bubble plugins and templates
Cranford Tech has been building Bubble plugins and templates for 2 years. But we’ve also acquired a number of plugins and templates in that time.
And now we want to acquire more.
This week we officially launched Cranford Tech Ventures to do just this. Plugin and template acquisitions are a bit of an unknown quantity in the wider Bubble community, so we wrote this launch post to help people understand how it works.
We typically look for 3 things when acquiring a plugin or template:
If you’re a plugin or template creator who would be interested in discussing an acquisition, get in touch here.
Editor ‘quality of life’ updates
You may have noticed some changes in your Bubble editor recently. That’s because the Bubble team released more than two dozen ‘quality of life’ updates. Some of the more popular updates include:
The ability to create unlimited style variables
The issue checker is now resizeable
Left-aligned privacy checkboxes (!)
Improved defaults across multiple elements
In a (probably?) related release, the icons in the editor sidebar menu have gotten wayyyyyyy smaller:
Plugin Spotlight: Universal Video Player
Have you wanted to play videos that users have uploaded directly to your Bubble app? Or maybe you’re hosting videos on AWS or Wasabi but can’t figure out how to play them with the standard Video element? The Universal Video Player plugin allows you to play videos from any of these locations.
It also comes with a bunch of other actions and states that give you full control over how videos are played in your app.
First step in plugin migration
It was the Bubble plugin ecosystem’s version of Y2K: the first step in the migration to AWS’s Node.js 18 runtime (from Node.js 16). To help ease the community into the deprecation, there was a planned brownout that lasted for 6 hours this Tuesday. During the time, any plugin server side actions that had not been updated to be compatible with node 18 effectively broke.
The brownout seemed to go relatively smoothly. While there were some complaints from users about issues with the API Connector, this seemed to be due to other 3rd party services rather than any issue with Bubble itself.
The Bubble team have been very communicative about the upcoming deprecation, so plugin creators should have been well aware this was coming.
The full upgrade will go live on April 10th, so plugin creators still have some time to update their code before their plugin actions become permanently deprecated.
Have a great weekend!
The Cranford Tech team