What’s New at BuildFire in 2020

To say that 2020 has been a crazy year would be a drastic understatement. But here at BuildFire, our team has stayed busy working around the clock to improve our software and services.

In the midst of all our hard work, it recently dawned on me—we haven’t really announced any of these updates.

I initially planned to send out a newsletter highlighting our achievements, but quickly realized there was just way too much information to cram into a single email. To keep our customers in the loop with what’s happening here at BuildFire, I decided to blog about what we’ve accomplished this year.

This article contains tons of useful information about our product updates, service resources, and even information about improving your business during COVID-19.

I’m really excited to share these updates. Hope you enjoy!

New Product Updates to the BuildFire Platform

Improving our software is something we do on a daily basis. We’re always listening to feedback from our customers and finding new ways to enhance your experience. This year, we’ve made dozens of noteworthy updates. From simple UX/UI enhancements to completely new marketplace features, these updates will make your life much easier and improve the quality of your app.

With so many updates to cover, I’ve segmented them into various categories that you can scan through below.

New Marketplace Features

Our marketplace is growing. This year alone, we’ve added 15+ new features. If you haven’t noticed, make sure you log in and check out these brand new plugins:

• User Profile Action Folder

• Container Plugin

• Card Manager

• QR Code Scanner

• Menu Order System

• Folder 2.0

• Customer Feedback 2.0

• Weight Tracker

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• User Directory

• Premium Social Inbox

• File Directory

No matter what type of app you’ve already launched or you’re in the process of building, I’m confident that you’ll find a good use for at least some of these new features.

Enhanced Marketplace Features

In addition to the completely new features listed above, we’ve also made some improvements to our existing marketplace plugins that you already know and love. Some noteworthy examples include:

• Free Text Questionnaire — Facelift
• Places 2.0 — Facelift
• Folder — Facelift
• Premium Social Wall — Facelift
• Media Center Manual — Deep linking support added
• Loyalty Plugin — Added the ability to earn points via products; Added results tab and language tab; Facelift
• WYSIWYG editor — Created a new theme (White Modern) and set it as the new default; Added action items functionality and image library functionality; Made all plugins available by default

Again, all of these enhancements were inspired by real feedback from our customers. So if you have any suggestions, please continue to reach out and let us know.

Control Panel Enhancements

We’ve also made lots of changes to the control panel to improve the experience for app owners and admins. Here’s a quick overview of those improvements:

• Added the ability to set or change home feature from the control menu
• Added the ability to clone features with or without data
• Utilized more space (totally updated and facelifted UI) to allow easier control of an app
• Added a new search bar in the control panel header
• Added the ability to search for marketplace features from the new search bar
• Added the ability to search for last added and last visited features from new search bar
• Made enhancements to the Image Library, including:
  • Increased image grid area
  • Added ability for drag & drop image uploads into the whole grid
  • Added option for small or large view of images
  • Added image search (giving the ability to find images by name)
  • Added functionality for image name to display on hover
  • Added ability to rename file upon uploading
  • Added ability to upload GIF and SVG images

Overall, we’re confident that these control panel enhancements will really make your life much easier as you’re building and making changes to your app on the backend.

2 Factor Authentication Automation

The 2FA automation to the publishing process is an update that we’re proud to announce. This in itself was a multiple month epic project on our end.

As a result, our customers can now get up and running in a matter of seconds, as opposed to potentially waiting days to get scheduled with someone on the BuildFire side for authentication.

Not only does this add an extra layer of security, but it also helps get your app to market faster.

Action Item Changes

We also made several significant changes to the action item functionality on our platform. All of these updates were made to reduce friction points on the admin side whenever you’re setting up a new action item.

In fact, we even ran a click-through analysis to see exactly how many clicks it takes to set up a new action item. Compared to the old system, we drastically reduced that number, so it will save you a ton of time as you’re going through this process.

As for the specifics, a handful of noteworthy action item changes include:

• We made “link to app content” the default option
• When “link to app content” option is selected, you can import plugin image, name the image icon, and add action button text
• We updated and amended the names of all action item options
• We increased the action button text limit
• We fixed button colors to match the style guidelines

All of these changes make the action items more intuitive from the admin side. You’ll notice these benefits almost immediately, the next time you create a new action item.

Other Misc. Changes

There are a few other updates I wanted to address, but they don’t really fit into any other category. The following enhancements ultimately benefit the end-users for your app:

• Intro screens — Added animation to background images and text elements
• Login screen — Added animation to background images, input elements, and buttons
• User profiles — Added animation to profile and cover images
• Navigation between plugins — Modified slide in animation with different easing and timing for a smoother feel

Think of this as the foundation for your app. These simple and subtle changes will make your app more appealing to its users.