The early hurdles for PeakZebra mostly had to do with getting tables to display in a sweet, full-function way on the front end. My take is that we completely crushed that particular challenge.
The next hard thing was harder, though. It was the complex problem of how to create custom logic and computation within an application that was build from blocks. Since PeakZebra is all about building apps with Gutenberg blocks, the obvious thing was to reate a block, or group of blocks, that represented the logic flow.
That’s a lot harder than it may sound, though.
In the end, the solution was three initial blocks, featuring a back-end UI that let you select things like the piece of information you wanted to work with by presenting a list of possibilities, rather requiring you to remember the right field (and spell its name correctly).
The three blocks are:
Calculation — Perform some math on data elements, or combine some text strings.
Trigger — Make a comparison that determines whether actions need to be taken. You might compare a person’s age to the minimum age for legally buying alcohol in a given state or country.
Action — Do something that isn’t a calculation (since there’s already a calculation block for that). You might move some info to a task in the task table, for example. Or you might make a new entry in the calendar table.
There are a couple of further blocks in the works right now, but you can do a shocking amount with just the above (heck, Zapier pretty much does everything it does with just triggers and actions, right?).
We’ll be publishing a whole set of recipes for ways to make good use of these special blocks and we’re always ready to work with you to get the application you need.