Q: What are your top 3 missing things/features in Fibery?

BTW, what are your top 3 missing things/features in Fibery? :slight_smile:

For me:

  • entity-level permissions
  • customizable entity views and Dashboards (Blocks?)
  • better support for scripts, e.g.:
    • debugging
    • code reuse (e.g. modules or libraries)
    • more high-level API functions (e.g. “duplicate an entity”)

…and more:

  • more-polished and consistent UI (e.g. better keyboard and focus handling)
  • more-functional Table view, with a more “spreadsheet-like” experience
  • some kind of polymorphic type support
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Now that we have a lot of power in Automations, buttons, etc. to do notifications, reminders, etc. I am mostly good on needing additional “functionality”/features. I consider the above 3 to be more about making Fibery into a more “bespoke” system that is more deeply customized to my needs, allowing my users and I to focus on what is important to us, to document as much as we want without it getting in the way when we don’t, e.g. alternate layout views, not having to have a relation field for every possible related type but using polymorphic and a single field to represent certain kinds of relationships much more cleanly, etc.

The one additional priority I’d add would be improvements to the Notifications, I think. I would want an entire page/screen dedicated to this, and/or maybe even a special Block type so I can embed a (optionally filtered) notifications view in any page (ooo). It should show more info and be more sophisticated in general. And/or perhaps some aspects of a “my work”/“my view” would meet the same need as well or better…

I would also love some more spreadsheet-like functionality in Table views, as @Matt_Blais suggests, though it doesn’t quite make it into the top 3 for me.

1 Like

Can I also share my top 3?

  • to be able to insert different views inside docs to build our own dashboard / overviews
  • being able to customize the view of an entitty and how data is presented there. Migrating entity views to blocks might help us do that? A very simple ex… i have some project entity and when I open it I want to see the description, a timeline and below a table view (which is much more readable in many cases than the simple card view used currently) of some tasks
  • allowing guest users to edit/submit data + native forms. The main reason for this is that I want to use Firbery in as many areas as possible, like hiring (let people submit applications) or user feedback (let users vote and discuss features). I know that some can be implemented by using Zapier plus some other app, but I don’t like to use more 3rd party apps. I don’t want to use Typeform for every form submission or some feedback app when 90% of features are already inside Fibery.

Extras i would love

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  • Show image in some summary view, like the Kanban view.
    For us it would be incredibly useful if we could just paste image from clipboard (Windows+Shift+S → CTRL+V). Attachment extension is nice and we use it, but not well suited for “featured image” (?) and pasting from clipboard. We would use it with our in-office customer to show a high level overview over their orders, and they want to see the images they’ve selected (which we just screenshot and paste in). As it is now we’d have to go into each entity.
  • Usability on mobile and touch devices. Former I have heard from several people, because Trello can (even have their own app I think?), and they want to add stuff to the Workspace when they’re on the fly and think of stuff. For touch device it would be nice if we could use it in the office here on a tablet to go over orders we have laying around.
  • Publicly share a view with just a link. I want to show people development process. There should have to be some restrictions on opening up entities though, because I selectively show fields in my view. Some fields and their values are not meant for others to see.
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Of the most pressing, which is really upsetting:

  • “Archive” status for Entities at the level of the system core.
  • Filters for Relations.
  • Extended Table view (grouping, batch edit, etc).

Other functions, the absence of which can be tolerated for now:

  • Limited functionality of Document (not as in Notion: 0)
  • “Action Center” as a separate custom object. Very conveniently implemented in Planfix. And people have already given examples above.
  • Limited comment functions.

I listed what was not indicated in the roadmap in the near future.

But it should be borne in mind that I have collected little statistics on work cases so far. The second part of the list can change dramatically.

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+1 for Extended table view

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  • Form view
  • More robust views/cards (e.g. Improve and Expand Card Layout Across Views. Fibery’s views are just not as useful and polished as other services out there. Especially the timeline and calendar views)
  • A personalized space: Clickup as a whole has much better personalization (view configuration, etc) and a spot where you can see all “your” stuff you are working on, coming up, etc
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I have to agree with @Oshyan 's list and the sentiment that I am hoping that a few foundational features are added that can then allow building more interesting things on top.

  • Blocks: to enable embedding of views, entities (in-line or as blocks) which will really help with generally being able to reorganize entity views and creating things like dashboards. I am hoping that this is also supported in markdown templates (i.e. you are able to insert view blocks into entities when they are created using rules with parameters defined at creation time)

  • Polymorphic relations: that is consolidating relation fields so that every relation (even those that are rare/occasional) don’t have to be explicitly defined. I am also hoping this would include adding properties to relations. I think this makes fibery’s relations truly graph-like and allow things like building knowledge systems or even building a very powerful CRM or contacts graph where you are interested in connections between people but also how they are are connected)

  • Improvements to table view: this includes grouping and aggregate/rollup functions, searching & temporary filtering (i.e. for quick lookup of current data without permanently changing view filters), and some more rendering options for URLs and rich text fields.

I tend to group things that in my mind go together or seem to require consideration together even though they might considered distinct features so apologies if I crammed more than 3 things above.

As far as other items:

  • Search improvements: this includes search & replace (for simple text & for entity references), extending search to other fields, scoping, setting filters (e.g. for closed items), and providing more context in search window.

  • Geospatial field types: this is not a priority for anyone but it remains a pain point for anyone dealing with physical world (construction, real-estate, architecture & engineering, retail, etc.). Even possibility of having json fields that at least check json formatting would be a good start.

  • Plugins/extensions/custom blocks: to allow users to create some features that are not priorities for fibery core. I understand this has to be done very carefully so just adding it as a consideration when building some of the underlying things like block to enable this in the future. One use case for me is implementation of a map view/block using leaflet (related to above).

Thanks again for all the hard work. It is amazing what has been accomplished to date :grin:

5 Likes

For now,

  1. Pinned column (table view)
  2. Much easier way of adding rows to a table (the one inside a document or a rich-text field)
  3. Sorting Rules in the Configure App window
1 Like

I agree 100% on your list!

If only three then

  1. Hiding fields from the entity view/permissions level for certain fields
  2. Pinned Columns in Table View
  3. More robust/intuitive formulas for handling the combination of text and data fields
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  1. Form view
  2. Form view
  3. Form view

:yum:

This is the only thing left that makes Airtable better than Fibers and the only thing that forces me to use third-party solutions, which is far from efficient.
take care
pat

3 Likes

We have Form View in our plans for the next several months. We heard a lot of similar feedback and decided to prioritize it higher.

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New user here with 1,000s of hours of use in other tools such as ClickUp, Asana, Airtable, and the likes. Fibery has blown me away and I’m absolutely loving it! I have just a couple of my team members using Fibery thus far but I’m close to implementing it for my entire team. That said, I have a few hesitations around the following features or lack thereof:

  1. Private publishing of individual spaces: we’re a software business and it’s imperative that we have the ability to share a real-time board of open feature requests or support tickets specific to each customer. We’ve tested the public sharing feature, but it exposes all spaces that have been set to be public. Would be a massive benefit to have private, space-specific shareable URLs which we can distribute to each of our customers.
  2. Forms: my team is fanatical about seamless team-to-team handoffs. Thus, I’m very hopeful that Fibery incorporates database-specific forms very soon. It will increase efficiencies between teams especially for intake- or request-like actions. There are so many obvious use cases here: a new closed customer sale becomes an onboarding request to customer success; a customer success/support interaction invokes a request to engineering or a feature request to product, a product marketing request to our marketing team, so on and so forth.
  3. Docs improvements - including table, board, list blocks and a Space overview/details page: Docs could use a nice boost with additional blocks, specifically auto-generated table of contents, view/board/list blocks, and more. Secondly, when clicking on a Space name in the left nav, the user is immediately navigated to what looks and feels like a space “settings” page. I find this to be misleading for non-admin or non-creator users. I would love to see this improved to where a user is navigated to a Space overview/details page, or at the very least a Document page that is customizable with blocks. This overview page/doc is intended to provide those non-admin/non-creator users with a description of the Space (the Why) and in a perfect world, blocks of the views, docs, etc. included in the Space (maybe even in an auto-generated table of contents type experience).

Other honorable mentions to note:

  1. Better in-line, contextual collaboration/commenting on entities. ClickUp and FrontApp have the best implementations of this functionality in my experience. It’s a subtle and non-overwhelming blend of not only commenting but also historical activity on an entity in the same timeline. Fibery has this, but the poor comments block gets lost amongst the overwhelming amount of other related entities blocks and the entity history is a bit tucked away requiring additional user effort to find it.
  2. Additional integrations and extensions for interoperability with Microsoft products such as Teams, Outlook calendar and email sync.
  3. A “Home” page or user dashboard with a high-level summary of recent entities visited, overdue entities (of those with due date fields),
5 Likes

HI @calh-fsp
Thanks for the excellent feedback.

  1. It is possible to publish selected elements of a space (document views, entity views, report views) without making the entire space public.

For the first two, it’s under the share icon
image

For reports, it’s under the … menu

If you want to share a status of the project with outside stakeholders, you might want to generate a report (optionally with several charts/tables) for that purpose.

Alternatively, you might consider inviting customers into your workspace as guests (= free of charge) and granting them access to only the spaces that are relevant for them.

Of course, these add a bit of friction compared to just sharing a space, so the idea of space-specific public URLs is certainly a good one, thanks.

  1. A form view is certainly on the roadmap, but it just hasn’t reached the top of the to-do list yet :slightly_frowning_face:
    Our workaround at the moment is third-party tools (we use TypeForm) connected via Zapier or Make.

a.) We are working intensely on making docs/rich-text better, including adding blocks for views. We have also got a table of contents option on the radar.

b.) A ‘space overview’ page (or something like it) is a popular request, and I agree we should get to it. It’s not yet clear whether it should be a auto-generated summary view which every space will have, or something more flexible like allowing users to make a read.me doc with configurable view blocks etc.
I imagine that we will think more deeply about this use case once the blocks work is rolled out.

Honorable mentions:
Very constructive feedback, thanks.

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Thanks @Chr1sG for the quick feedback! I was aware of sharing individual entities and docs, but not of sharing reports. I can see the usefulness of sharing a report and how that could be a great workaround for the time being until view blocks are available in Docs to share with clients. I contemplated inviting customers to our Fibery space to accomplish our requirement but that approach tends to be more headache for customers as you mentioned.

Happy to hear your team is aware of and considering entity view blocks and forms. I’ve been scouring the Fibery community and have seen the pattern as well. These seem to be fairly pervasive across the user base.

Looking forward to more amazing updates from the Fibery team! Cheers :+1:

  1. Notion of hierarchy and not just relationship (any properties which I would like to “inherit” from parent automatically without setting up all fields manually through the chain)
  2. Notion of a state or at least some basic validation (e.g. no way of preventing entities being created “done” in the first place).
  3. More complex or configurable views
1 Like
  1. That sounds like you would like to see lookup values from parent entities automatically? Is that what you mean?
    I think it may be a bad idea to automatically show all parent’s fields on entity view - it would clutter the UI.
    Perhaps you can elaborate on what contexts would this be useful?

  2. Do you mean Required fields on the layout or maybe you mean validation rules?

  3. Can you give some examples of what you’re missing?

  1. seeing is one of the use cases, filtering on those (for me) is much more important. GUI solution might be different than “normal field”, on that one I do not have a suggestion. Pain is everywhere you have information hierarchy: Theme → Epic → Feature; Department → Team → User. Having those built as independent entities is an assumption built in the system. This assumption is not always true for real world cases.
  2. both required field and/or validation rules will help to solve the problem, probably.
  3. example: timesheet table view (list of e.g. tasks vertically and dates horizontally - values in cells). This is for a set of filtered results.