Several questions about interface / help

[cobalt700]

I’m new to Bardeen and finding it impossibly clunky to use and was hoping to get some feedback on some specific things that have been frustrating in particular, hopefully I’m just missing something…

• How do I reorder blocks? It seems the only way to swap the order of two blocks is to entirely delete one and readd it elsewhere which deletes a ton of settings.
• Use strings as URLs? For example, say I want to use the “Do Navigate to URL in current tab” action and have it navigate to the current url + “/about” or something. Since the only way I see to concatenate strings is the “Merge Text” action and that outputs a string it can’t be used as a URL anymore. There’s a “Convert to URL encoded string” but it does not seem to be useful here.
• Merge conditional branches? I can’t see any way to merge branches of a conditional. Say for instance I want to use a URL but modify it slightly (say append “/about” to it) and then use it in all subsequent actions in place of the original. Any conditional statements seems to split the entire remaining program so everything has to be duplicated many times which is quite a headache.
• Save unfinished playbooks? Sometimes I want to refer back to other playbooks or settings etc.

Thanks for any help!

[ivan]

Hi @cobalt700

@cobalt700

• How do I reorder blocks? It seems the only way to swap the order of two blocks is to entirely delete one and readd it elsewhere which deletes a ton of settings.

There’s currently no way of reordering actions. This great feedback. You can share this on Share an idea so other users can also upvote this.

@cobalt700

Since the only way I see to concatenate strings is the “Merge Text” action

This is just about to change. We’ve released an inline text editor that should be available on the latest version of Bardeen. This will allow faster text edition and dinamic text building.

@cobalt700

• . Any conditional statements seems to split the entire remaining program so everything has to be duplicated many times which is quite a headache.

Great point and agree! Duplicating the conditional branches could be very helpful to avoid double-work.

@cobalt700

Save unfinished playbooks

We don’t have that possibility either. I have ran into cases where I want to save and need to finish a big workfflow before doing so.

Maybe turning automations into “drafts” when there’s missing data needed can be a solution for this.

Thanks for sharing these are some great suggestions and UX improvements we can consider.

Tagging @sasha @Pierre into these

[cobalt700]

Ah gotcha, well glad to hear I wasn’t missing something obvious but that’s a real bummer that none of these are possible right now, I hope they can be addressed soon. There’s so much potential here but I feel like it’s just barely out of reach because of tons of small issues like these that make things weirdly difficult.

Thanks for the response!

[ivan]

I empathize, thanks for the feedback!