What is Lorem Ipsum and Why Do You See It in Bubble Apps?
Lorem Ipsum is perhaps the most popular placeholder text. It's a popular dummy text used to fill space where you would put text on a website to show that it's a placeholder. But why do we see Lorem Ipsum throughout a Bubble app? Well, I'm going to explain it in this video but before I do that did you know that we have got hundreds of Bubble tutorial videos that you can only find on our website planetnocode.com. You can't find them on our YouTube channel, they're exclusive to our members at planetnocode.com.
Understanding Lorem Ipsum in Bubble Pages
But what is going on here and why do I see Lorem Ipsum on my page and why do I see Lorem Ipsum in the URL of my test app? Well, it's because the page that I have set up here is set to type of content contacts. Contacts is a data type in my database and it means that I've set this page up ready for it to take in information about one contact and display that one contact information, in this case first name, last name.
The Reason Behind Lorem Ipsum Placeholders
But you can't find in my database there is no contact called Lorem Ipsum. It's because I've been editing this page and I've clicked preview and Bubble doesn't know by just me clicking preview which contact to show on my page here and that can be a little bit frustrating because first of all you think well I've not got Lorem Ipsum in my database so why is it showing up and also it's not that great and adequately kind of filling in with the placeholders perfectly.
Best Practices for Testing Contact Pages
If I'm testing what a contact page looks like I would do much better to click through from a contact. So there's a couple of things here that are worth remembering and I know I've classed them as solid Bubble basics. One is the right time to use type of content. I see people doing this not necessarily wrong but adding unnecessary complexity to the application because they don't do it right which is that type of content is if you are going from like a list on a different page like a list of contacts and linking through to a page that shows mainly a single contact.
Using Type of Content in Bubble Apps
Of course you could bring in data from other parts of the database but I'm mainly showing one contact's information here and if I go on to my I have that I have a list of contacts here so I have a table of contacts and I will have a workflow set up for no not that one where is it here okay so yeah when part of it is clicked I go through to my page contact and I can't leave that blank when I'm linking through from one part of my Bubble app to my contacts singular page I have to provide a contact to go through but for I don't know for convenience if I am in my contact my singular contact page in the editor I can link through to that page without filling in an entry from my database from my contacts database into this page so that's why I get the Lorem Ipsum placeholders.
Improving Your Testing Process
If you're building a Bubble app and you're testing it I think a much better step is once you've built the template where you're using that singular instance of the database you're displaying that on the page it's then to immediately go and even if it's very rough create yourself a repeating group on another page that gives you that list of entries in the database so then if I click preview here I can click through on Bruce and now I'm not getting Lorem Ipsum if I bring up the URL you can see that this is the unique ID for Bruce and it's just yeah I thought it's worth going this video because I think that it can get a little bit confusing around when to use type of content and just why sometimes if you click preview you'd be seeing Lorem Ipsum on both the page and in the URL so I hope that helps if you've got any questions please leave them in a comment below.