August 14, 2024 / 🤖 Manage automation Rules as a Creator, New sidebar design, Expand cards to show nested collections

[mdubakov]

Tomorrow is a holiday in Poland and Cyprus, so we are releasing today. This release has at least one long-awaited feature, sprinkled by some less expected things. Enjoy!

Manage automation Rules as a Creator

(special for Shlomi, Rob, and 40 more people)

No more 12 Admins in a workspace, no more “could you please set up this Rule for me”. Now everyone with Creator access to a Space can configure no-code automation Rules and Buttons.

Since you can traverse relations beyond the current Space via automation, we additionally check for the corresponding capabilities when saving a Rule. For example, if you want to close all the Bugs (Issue Tracking Space) when their Feature (Product Management Space) is done, you’ll need at least Editor access to the Bug DB’s Space in addition to Creator access to the Feature DB’s Space. Check out the guide for a detailed breakdown.

NOTE: Script action has unlimited power so it’s still reserved for Admins — at least for now.

Coming next: notifying Creators and not just Admins if a Rule or a Formula breaks.

Is there anything else that’s currently reserved for Admins but shouldn’t be? Please let us know.

New sidebar design

We are excited to announce the latest update to our sidebar, designed to enhance your navigation experience!

• Decreased nested indents to save horizontal space, making it easier to navigate through multiple levels.
• Icons replace triangles for folders and smart folders, and abbreviation badges simplify entity representation.
• Easily expand or collapse items with a clear triangle indicator, improving visibility on what can be interacted with.

These updates address previous concerns about navigation clarity and sidebar width.

Expand cards to show nested collections (experimental)

(special for Jan and Diego)

Manipulating and organizing entity collection hierarchies on the whiteboard is challenging. Today we’re introducing Collections, they will help you to quickly add related cards to the whiteboard, thus exploring hierarchies fast.

Click on any card and find Collections menu. Here you can select nested entities and apply filter to show only relevant to you. You can also remove collections from the board with two clicks.

Essentially, it works like collapse and expand, but with some tricks, since there can be many collections and various filters.

Enable this feature in Settings → Experimental Lab.

Improvements

• Multiple Entity Views:
  • Now you can Duplicate Entity View, thus creating new Entity Views faster. Duplicate action is available in … menu for Multiple Entity Views. (special for Josiah and Cameron)
  • Templates now respect and support Multiple Entity Views
• Now it is possible to create a report that shows the number of Fibery users in different roles (member/admin/guest) (special for Greg)
• Hide when empty option was added to Field’s action menu for quicker and easier access when working directly with Fields on Entity View, without having to constantly jump to Manage Fields & Layout menu.

Fixed Bugs

• Whiteboard:
  • Full screen error appears when someone opens the same board from @public space
  • When using the pencil tool, the right mouse button stops panning the board
  • Relation doesn’t get restored if delete relation line and then undo
• Context views have unpredictable title and breadcrumbs path in “Recent items”
• Highlight editor pop-up persists even if source entity is collapsed
• Database and Space actions are not hidden for users without corresponding permissions
• Left menu is shifted when auto scrolled in collapsed mode
• Firefox: drop-downs auto collapsing for Rules opened in pop-up
• Got 0 vectors from ai-search resulted in infinite load of Clustering
• Hide when empty toggle doesn’t work for rich-text snippet

[Illusory]

@mdubakov

New sidebar design

Can’t wait to test this out!

@mdubakov

Now you can Duplicate Entity View, thus creating new Entity Views faster. Duplicate action is available in … menu for Multiple Entity Views. (special for Josiah and Cameron)

I noticed this and immediately came to the forum to see if there was any documentation of it. Thank you so much

[Nevil_Hulspas]

Love the design changes on the sidebar, feels much more tight and dialed in!

Maybe it’s just my perception but the row height in a table feels like it’s not the same as the row height in the sidebar items. More inner padding it seems like, or different size font? Not sure. But prefer to have the table rows to be the same.

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Aside from this, I have a request for a feature relating to automations in a sense, namely validation options. For example: user updates the state of a task from todo → archived. This user should enter a small text field why it was set to archived, and this text should then be logged somewhere in a db in Fibery. This should also be controllable by automations. This way we can setup very intricate workflows where nobody is “allowed” to change certain fields, or if they are allowed, they should give a reason for the changed field. Hope something like this will be possible in the future.

[Yuri_BC]

@mdubakov

The toad made my day, we can keep it as forum moderator… does it have a name?

1. Creators cofiguring automation rules: great! I love every improvement of permissions.
2. New sidebar design: very slick, thanks. Related: I tried to move a smart section above the spaces, but that appears impossible. This while a smart section often is considered very important, thus intuitively would be placed above spaces.
3. Whiteboard nested collections: Promising! You wont believe it but I have not used whiteboards at all because of the effort it takes to create (still boring) diagrams (thats why I use Excalidraw). Nested collections however may interestingly result in an automatic whiteboard per entity at some point? That is close to a navigation graph.

[grex22]

Love the new sidebar design – it’s beautiful! I also noticed that “Create anything from sidebar” is now a toggle in the Experimental Lab, and I LOVE THAT even more.

Good thinking to include the “Recent” entities in that pop-up list as well

[njyo]

Hehe, I fully concur!

1. Rules now for Creators and not just Admins is great! Now my I can empower my team.
2. Whiteboard nested collections I may not use just yet, but any love that the Whiteboard gets I’m in favour of!
3. Nicer side-bar is also very nice and allowed me to remove some of my Stylus CSS overrides.

One small refinement on the sidebar I would wish, however, is to have a small padding above each Space. We use a lot of spaces and so having a bit of a padding above each space allows me to visually group and scan each space:

Hope y’all had a nice break and thanks for all the nice improvements!

[YvetteLans]

@grex22

Love the new sidebar design – it’s beautiful! I also noticed that “Create anything from sidebar” is now a toggle in the Experimental Lab, and I LOVE THAT even more.

Oh wow, I love that too!

For us it would be ideal to add a button ‘submit & open’. Because the form views don’t work well currently for most our use cases. If the user can fill in the name & open the item to fill in the rest of the fields, that would be ideal!

(Off course another solution will also work; currently you can only open the newly created item at the bottom of the page. But I’m afraid users will not notice that soon enough)

[Yuri_BC]

@YvetteLans

submit & open

I disagree that this is a good new feature. I perpetuates the core problem.

This is one of the main limitations of Fibery for user experience, and new users certainly will be annoyed about it.

It would be a big improvement if one-click-create-and-open will be possible. It is such a basic need that developers overlooked it since they are so used to how Fibery works now (developer’s tunnel vision, not meant as personal criticism, happens in every dev team, you are a great team).

Currently, the new solution shows:

We don’t need that!

Instead, the use needs to see immediately a new entity view:

Why apply outdated behavior? A smart folder ‘+’ button comes close to that already, with one click:

So similar to a Smart Folder button, if that is permanently available as select list at the bottom, the problem is solved.

[Chr1sG]

@Yuri_BC

@YvetteLans

submit & open

I disagree that this is a good new feature. I perpetuates the core problem.
…
It would be a big improvement if one-click-create-and-open will be possible.

Sorry, what is the difference between ‘submit & open’ and ‘one-click-create-and-open’ (apart from the terminology)?

Do you mean that the latest feature (to create an entity from the sidebar) should not bring up a form where the user provides a name, but should immediately bring up entity view of a newly-created entity (with no fields populated)?

[Yuri_BC]

@Chr1sG

Do you mean that the latest feature (to create an entity from the sidebar) should not bring up a form where the user provides a name, but should immediately bring up entity view of a newly-created entity (with no fields populated)?

Yes, exactly.
Yvette referred to ‘submit&open’ of the name field popup, which still is a two step process of first seeing a form, filling in the name, hitting submit and then seeing the entityview appear, but I am referring to the new plus button at the bottom left corner, that I suggest should skip the form and immediately show a new entity view.

[YvetteLans]

@Yuri_BC

that I suggest should skip the form and immediately show a new entity view.

Why skipping the form?

I do like the forms. Since I can show a description for each field so that a user sees at glance what kind of information they need to fill in (which I can’t in a normal entity view; there it’s hidden behind the question mark)

If I can filter/sort the information in the relation dropdowns, I would love to use the forms to quickly add new entities.

But if that’s not possible currently, then it would be nice if a user can open the newly created entity more easily.

Edit: and maybe it would be a nice idea to have the same functionality like we have in normal views.

• Simply add a new entity (and skip the form)
• Or create an entity via form

Then you have best of bost worlds IMO.

[interr0bangr]

Mostly amazing updates this week, especially whiteboard creator automation permissions, whiteboard collections and duplicating entity views (relation views next please!)

Except I absolutely hate how every single entity in the sidebar is now required to have an icon. There’s so much more unnecessary visual clutter now!

Like, considering before the update we had no icons in our menu, to wake up to this is crazy:

Can you go back to not showing an icon for an entity, unless it’s explicitly been given one?

Or add a configuration option inside of folders (similar to the field toggles in list views) where you can hide the icon? We have no need to see the database abbreviation 50 times.

Thank you.

[Chr1sG]

@interr0bangr

I absolutely hate how every single entity in the sidebar is now required to have an icon

Entities always had an icon, but previously it also served as the expand/collapse function (if that was needed) so it’s more the case that this functionality has been separated out.

In the case of your image, the entities in the upper half are basically the same as before (although the previous ‘square dot’ icon is now a db letter icon) and the entities in the lower half have gained a chevron to their left.

[interr0bangr]

Semantics aside, there’s now 2 icons next to entities that used to have 1 and the addition of the new icon is very visually intrusive for us, which is a step backwards in my opinion.

I understand that technically you’ve always used an icon next to an entity, but before it had a functional purpose, either acting as a bullet or expansion indicator.

The arrow icon is functionally unchanged from before, so no complaints there, but the database abbreviation icon provides no functional value (for us) besides making the sidebar feel more cluttered so I really hope we can suppress it somehow.

[cannibalflea]

@Chr1sG

so it’s more the case that this functionality has been separated out

I think this is a good call. I’ve seen the who double-duty thing really confuse new team members.

However, I agree with @interr0bangr that the DB icon is now just really overwhelming. I actually found the small squares distracting and now this is even worse (in my opinion). I think having the ability to show icon/emoji (if not empty) as well as to turn the DB icon on and off in the configuration is a really good idea.

[Yuri_BC]

In the sidebar, I’m still missing two things:

1. The simple option to create custom folders to organize Spaces and Smart Sections. The innovations of the sidebar did not yet address that properly.
2. A button ‘collapse all’…because the sidebar when used becomes useless for overview.