Migrate Entity View to Blocks

Sure, there will be a selector for that

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I was wondering if there would be a way of inserting blocks through markdown templates? I am particularly interested in view blocks and the ability to specify some presets (database, columns, filters, sorting) and passing certain parameters at creation time. I see this being very useful for inserting custom views into newly created entities.

I totally understand this explanation and design decision and know this is a massive task with multiple goals.

However, I do still wonder how you are planning to address the issue of block references and transclusion. I think this is the major advantage of every paragraph/heading/bullet/image/etc. is a block approach that roam/innos/other tools use, where you are able to arbitrarily and any point in the future reference a deeply nested set of text or lists without having to first break it up:

I also don’t understand how the proposed breaking up would actually work and what the ramifications are. For example, how do you break out a subset of items in the third layer of a bulleted list without all the bullets getting indented back. It also seems like a lot of effort to just be able to reference those few bullets in another piece of text. From a UI perspective, I am afraid that this would also be quite ugly as there would be texts and lists broken up in all sorts of ways. I am also afraid of what this break-up process does to existing links.

I believe transclusion and block references should be one of the important outcome of this massive effort around blocks. Even if you can’t do it right now, I think it is important to have the foundation to achieve it in the future.

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I agree that there are some big unknown questions here.

Personally for now I am less concerned about having low-level blocks, but I’d love to be able to “quote”/reference specific sections of text really easily, like we can here in Discourse. I’ve said it before, but I think it is questionable whether it’s better to have a system that always operates on referencing of whole blocks, vs. one where you can simply select what you want to reference (with e.g. drag-select of text). Related previous discussions:

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While transclusion is a pretty generic mechanism, we’d like to focus on a few specific scenarios (at least, for now). Here are a couple of examples:

  • Writing explorable docs for curious readers
  • Connecting customer feedback to work

In most of these cases, the transcluded Blocks are large and uninterrupted. Unlike Roam’s, our editor doesn’t lean towards hierarchical structures — thus, we don’t feel the pressure to support deep transclusions right from the start.

Anyway, this is more of a theory at the moment ­— we’ll see how it goes in the private alpha/beta.

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Real example of blocks usage (with real data) in a Strategic Initiative entity.
It has some specs, List of Features, Roadmap and Board with marketing tasks.
UI is very rough, we will polish everything in January and add comments threads here as well.

2021-12-28 14.20.13

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This is looking really cool. I’d love to see an “Embed Iframe” type block. A really big gap at the moment is the ability to embed something like a Figma design in Fibery.

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Yes, I second some attention being paid to “embeds”. Lots of other tools get a lot of “shallow” but still quite valuable “integration” out of this approach, even to the point of being able to iFrame editable Google Sheets docs into pages, etc. I commonly see Miro and Figma also in this context.

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you can embed Figma, just copy paste the link of the screen or group, etc.

We use it all the time when writing features specs and stories. Only downside is that while it loads everything freezes

I’ve been playing around with pages and blocks for a bit of prototyping and I have to say that figuring out nesting of blocks and being able to collapse/expand is definitely a missing piece. Given that the only way to group items currently in fibery is through headings, I don’t know how that is going to work when view blocks have to sit outside of the text blocks and have no interaction or hierarchy.

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I cannot wait for this block party to pop off, it may prove to be the thing I need to evangelize some people at my company. If you need some alpha testers, I would like to offer myself up as tribute!

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A new report and data analysis-oriented tool is taking the modern Notion-esque design and blocks approach to report creation, charts, etc. and it looks pretty nice. But also like something Fibery should be able to get close to once the Blocks migration is complete:

I think this is a great example of where in-line Values and Calculations could be very valuable, and a strong differentiator vs. Notion, ClickUp, and some others (Coda already has this though).

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We experiments innos .io app .The wiki view with dash board as task report also is the need for many users of project and product managements .Every new update is made user request based block similar to wordpress , html embed and even play ground to run code via block . The user based block can help too template of one user un paid to user paid urgent need .Thus massive user base can help fast several templates more userfriendly

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Looks like Innos is dead. https://twitter.com/InnosHQ

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Do we have any update on text blocks? It will be useful right now to update a lot of text like a definition of done on every story.

Right now, I can create an automation that will copy a text in the description of any new story created, but if I want to change it, it will need to be changed manually on every existing stories or overwrite it and erase any other text added afterward on a specific story.

Just giving some context in case there is already a workaround for this :blush:

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Not sure how blocks can help here.

To add text to all existing stories, you can create a On Schedule rule and execute it once. The rule can use Append content to Description action, for example:

How it will change with blocks?

Transclusions?

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Yes I agree, I think what @Louis-FelixBorealys is referring to is indeed transclusion which, if I understood correctly, a part of the Block update, right?

I’m also using a lot of text in Rich Text fields that are initialized On Create (to provide user manual of sort on how to use the entity). Hence I have the same need to be able to update them, including on entities already created. I could of course mention an entity containing the manual instead but 1) Mentions in Rich Text automations are not really nice to use (you need to use the object ID, you can’t benefit from the # autocomplete and 2) it’s a lower user experience since users have to click away to see the manuel instead of just reading.

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Exactly, I’m talking about transclusion. Videogame design and development come with a huge complexity where you have 4types of Design (game, visual, narrative, audio) that need to connect together to develop different content types (monsters, levels, NPC, towns, etc.). Transclusion of the different type of design (redacted in text blocks) referred to the stories/epic to develop would help a lot to remove chaos, trackability and updates! :smiley:

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Maybe I don’t get it, but I don’t see how transclusion will help. For every entity you have a template, but in every entity the STATE of template is unique, like if you have a list of checkboxes, some of them are checked and some not. Transclusion is a single piece of content inserted into many entities, but if you update it in a single place it will be update in all other places, so how it will help here?

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