Struklio 1.1.0 – Build Around Your Own Data

Struklio 1.1.0 is our biggest update so far.

Until now, Struklio has provided ready-made data structures for the types of apps we already supported. E-commerce apps had products. Service businesses had services. Restaurants had menu items.

That works well when your business fits one of those structures.

But not every business does.

With Struklio 1.1.0, that starts to change.

Introducing Custom Collections

Custom Collections let you create your own data types inside Struklio.

Instead of being limited to the structures we have already built, you can define what your own app needs.

For example, you could create a collection called Courses with fields for:

• Course name
• Description
• Price
• Instructor
• Image

Or create Properties with:

• Address
• Price
• Bedrooms
• Description
• Image

Or Events, Classes, Destinations, Recipes or something completely different.

You name the collection, choose the fields, and Struklio builds around that structure.

That means Struklio no longer needs to know in advance what your business looks like.

From templates to a builder platform

This is why Collections are such an important step for us.

Templates will continue to be an important part of Struklio. They make it possible to start quickly without building everything from scratch.

But templates should be starting points – not limits.

Custom Collections begin to separate the structure of Struklio itself from the structure of the apps created with it.

Instead of us deciding that an app must contain Products, Services or Menu Items, the person building the app can increasingly decide what their app contains.

That opens Struklio to significantly more types of businesses and ideas.

Small steps, directly from your phone

We also wanted creating Collections to follow the same philosophy as the rest of Struklio.

It shouldn’t feel like designing a database.

Create a Collection.

Give it a name.

Add a field.

Add another field.

Start adding content.

Each step is small and immediately becomes part of the application.

The first version supports the field types you need most – text, long text, numbers, yes/no toggles and images – while keeping the experience simple.

There is much more we can build on top of this foundation later.

A new Events & Community template

1.1.0 also introduces a completely new Events & Community template.

And this template is important for another reason: it is the first template built directly around Custom Collections.

The first version includes six working screens covering the main experience, including Home, Events, Event Detail, Announcements and event management – and it will keep growing from there.

A new Events & Community project also starts with a real Events Collection and sample event content already available.

That means you don’t open a new project and land in an empty application.

You can immediately see how the structure works, edit the content and start turning it into your own app.

Built on what already works

For this update, we didn’t want to add functionality just for the sake of making the feature list longer.

Where Struklio already had proven components, we reused them.

Announcements, for example, use the existing feed and post experience rather than introducing another separate system.

And there are features we deliberately haven’t pretended are ready yet.

Event registrations and member directories require real user-specific data models. They deserve to work properly when we introduce them, rather than appearing as buttons that don’t actually do anything.

A foundation for what comes next

Custom Collections are not the end of this direction.

They are the foundation.

Today, you can define your own data.

From here, that foundation can eventually expand into richer field types, relationships between Collections, more advanced actions and increasingly flexible ways to connect data with screens and components.

The long-term idea is simple:

Struklio should not need to know what you are building before you build it.

It should give you the building blocks to define that yourself.

1.1.0 is our first major step toward that.

Struklio keeps becoming more flexible

The first versions of Struklio proved that native mobile apps can be built directly from a mobile device.

The updates since launch have improved that experience piece by piece.

Struklio 1.1.0 goes deeper.

For the first time, we’re not only adding another feature to the builder.

We’re expanding what the builder itself can represent.

Custom Collections and Events & Community are the beginning of a much more flexible Struklio.

And there is a lot more to build.

1.1.0 is still in active development, and it gets a little closer to the final version every day. We’re aiming to ship it sometime in the next week.

And we keep building.