This is the first minimal release to check infrastructure and some mechanic. You can add Text and Table Blocks, use emojis and drag things around:
Right now Page is a slightly better version of a Document, but in nearest future we will improve it and make more functional. Our priorities:
Migrate Entity View to Blocks, replace all collections with Table Views
Add more Blocks: Whiteboard, Report, Board View, etc.
Allow Link Blocks from different Pages/Entities and have back-references.
Open Calendar, Timeline & Canvas Views in panel
Now you can open Entities in panels from Calendar, Canvas and Timeline View (Timeline should be enabled in Experimental Features so far). We are continue navigation improvements and focusing on Favorite fields now.
Looks interesting and good work, I’ll be keen to see how “copy and paste” of the blocks works and how templating works in automations for pages.
In the open source CMS Umbraco, they have quite a nice pattern from copy and pasting blocks. The ‘clipboard’ (local storage) stores an array of blocks that the user has copied, and then when they want to paste, they can select from that array of items. This is incorporated into the ‘created’ menu (your +) so that everything is in one place. Something like this:
Nice to see a first step with the Blocks project! Since it’s early I’ll refrain from too much comment, but as there was not much detail provided, I do have one important question: currently any new View you create becomes a Child of the Page. Is this intended to be how it works for everything moving forward? i.e. that an in-line view is a full-fledged “view” that must show up in the sidebar as well? This would be non-ideal to me, and I hope it’s just temporary. I also don’t know how this would work with e.g. Entity Rich Text, since an entity can’t have children in the same way as the Page type. I also hope that simply embedding existing views with all the existing configuration (filters, sort, columns, etc.) will be possible, and from past discussion I believe it will be.
For now, congrats on reaching an initial public milestone with this big project!
We’ll see how this will unfold. So far all Views created in Page or in Entity will be visible in left menu (for entity, if you have Smart Folder). We are not sure this is bad. If it is, we’ll have a setting to show/hide the View in left menu most likely.
Eventually it will be possible to add existing Views into the Page/Entity as well as a block, it will be handy for many cases.
Following up on @Oshyan 's comment, I am struggling to understand the benefits of having view blocks appearing as distinct child views of a page (or every entity). I can see that there is value in embedding existing views (and having the ability to jump to the original/expanded view).
I understand that this approach will allows fibery to have a single way of addressing data views, but I think it might be better to have an embed block for actual existing views and separate table/board/calendar/… block views that render on the page load.
I also have concerns about scalability of this as users start to add multiple views in each document or entity view and if we are going to at some point allow for other types of blocks to be added (perhaps developed by external developers).
I was hoping that the view blocks would actually be very lightweight components that are populated/updated when rendered. One of the things I wanted to be able to do with the view blocks was to build daily notes pages that have combination of text notes and reflections as well as meeting calendar view, todo table/board views, etc. . Creating a new set of views every day seems like it is going to become unmanageable very quickly. Not to mention probably making search hard as well.
To allow the above to work, I also think that there needs to be a way of generating view blocks using markdown templates (with a way of representing what is shown textually). So when you autogenerate new Daily Notes (or any other recurring item), you will have the view blocks already added.
Finally, I think Formulas in filters would be an essential ingredient so that you are able to define one view and have it adjust/filter based on surrounding content/blocks (see this discussion).
From the first view - I like it a lot
I was always missing a rich description to table view, this definitely solves that problem
I understand this is early version, but just a note on sizing of embedded table
I’d prefer auto-sizing to the amount of rows, currently it has a cap on some arbitrary number of rows
Another piece of feedback
Seems to be missing a way to “duplicate block” (e.g. i want to create another table with complex filter but with slight changes)
I managed to find a hack and duplicate table in a folder, but it didn’t attache to a page
And yet another piece of feedback on Pages
Page width wide/regular state is not persisted
I turn on wide to see columns, then it is switched back to regular when I reopen the page
Agree. It currently prints with vertical and horizontal scroll bars. I’d love to see the block grow or shrink automatically to the table size so it doesn’t cut off longer tables.
Very good start though - this gets Fibery much closer to some of Coda’s great documentation features.
Experimental: Page made of Blocks (Text and Table only)
Open Calendar, Timeline & Canvas Views in panel
13 Fixed Bugs
