Hi, WeWeb team!
We developers are by default your beta testers. And the recent updates have left many people confused. In addition to major changes, such as AI updates, there are constantly seemingly insignificant changes, which you can see only when you are actively using WeWeb. For example, quiet replacement of components (Rich Text, File Uploader).
We appreciate that you are trying to improve our user experience, but often with releases like this, typical issues pop up:
- Deprecated marking of some element. Thanks for maintaining backwards compatibility, but this approach means that at some point we need to replace all such elements in the entire project.
- Because of this, the best practice is to use wrappers for input elements and practice avoiding your default components as much as possible (such as buttons, whose behavior is regrettable).
- New elements sometimes have illogical settings, and necessary settings are either missing or in hard-to-reach places (e.g., a fresh Rich Text editor).
- Updates happen unexpectedly, and we canāt prepare for them.
- Itās not clear where to give feedback: we have OfficeHours, Feedback-ticket, āChat with Usā, and component repositories on GitHub. Either way, if we give feedback, weāll run into the problems on this list again, as an unexpected update keeps developers from working.
What Iām offering:
- Make Beta-stage for affiliate accounts. Since we are testers - give us tools for feedback. Weāll know about āfor everyoneā updates in advance and can find issues before release. There should be an option to switch between Beta editor and Live editor.
- At each component for us, add a āfeedbackā option to the context menu. And use your favorite AI to aggregate similar requests. Weāre open to regular OfficeHours-style calls for beta testers to discuss specific problems and solutions rather than general questions. Ideally link this to GitHub and indicate whose requests are considered in the commit.
- Add Approve for updates. Yes, this will increase bureaucracy, almost to the level of the European Parliament, but it will shoot bugs and problems out of production.
- As an alternative, you can follow Bubbleās way: allow us to select a release version of an Editor and its components base. And suggest us moving to updated codebase instead of forceful updates.
Any thoughts?
, all of this. I especially agree with the idea of individual developers being able to select a release version for the editor. Not all of us care about the AI features, so pushing toward that while removing options from well know components in order to improve AI builder compatibility is just frustrating.