2023 was an exciting year for Skuid, marked by new releases, improved capabilities, feature enhancements, and additional Skuid Skool courses. Over the past 12 months, we at Skuid have made significant upgrades to our platform, making it easier for our builders to create streamlined and intuitive digital experiences.
It was also an exciting year for low-code/no-code platforms overall, with more and more citizen developers, aka non-technical users, adopting these tools to create business applications. The rise of AI made headlines, inspiring us to incorporate AI-based functionality into our platform. And the growth of these solutions showed no signs of slowing down. By 2025, it’s expected that 70% of new applications will be built using a low-code or no-code platform.
2023 by the numbers
Builders, you were busy this year! During 2023, Skuid Builders …
- Saved 723k pages
- Created 138k components
- Set up 6408 models
- Created 433 design systems
Among our builders, the five most popular components of 2023 were:
- Table
- Wrapper
- Responsive Grid
- Form
- Button Set
Skuid Skool students were also very active this year, earning 2548 badges and 17 Skuid Builder Certifications (more on that later)!
The theme of the year: Edinburgh
We named our major release of 2023 after the Scottish port city of Edinburgh. Known as the “Athens of the North,” this release’s namesake is famous for its striking architecture and gorgeous landscapes. Inspired by this lovely UK city, we focused this release on helping our users achieve elegance in their applications, adding and enhancing features aimed at building easy-to-navigate user experiences.
Core features
Some of the most fundamental components of the Skuid platform got an upgrade this year. A big one was the calendar component, which many of our customers rely on to manage all of their logistical activities. For some, it’s the main feature that ensures their operations run smoothly!
Calendar
To help it stand up to this tough task, we made lots of updates to the Calendar early in 2023, including:
- Better handling of Unassigned groups, like the ability to configure the visibility, label, and order placement of the Unassigned category
- The ability to group events horizontally or vertically.
- Improved processing logic to keep querying records until all events within the selected time frame are displayed.
- New merge variables to interact with event data during “on-click” and “event update” actions.
Skuid Community Discussion: Creating a Custom Calendar Modal
Action Framework
Our Action Framework also got some new additions this year. The below actions are now declarative, meaning they’re available in the Action Framework menu—no more Javascript snippets required:
- Copy to clipboard
- Evaluate formula fields (very handy for our many customers who use formula fields frequently)
- Open/close table drawers and accordion sections
Want to see these actions in action? Watch a demo.
Learn more about the Action Framework in Skuid Skool.
- Level 1: Action Framework learning path
- Level 2: Action Framework Power Features course
- Want to practice building with these new actions? Check out the Edinburgh Update 2 course
Form enhancements
2023 saw a number of significant improvements to our application builder, especially around complex forms. Users can now perform client-side validation based on length as defined in the field's metadata, which can be set by the data source or field metadata overrides. They can also set custom error messages for required fields. Try it out live in our Edinburgh demo page.
Forms now have several new label properties as well. “Hide label” allows field labels to be totally hidden from the user interface while still being available to screen reader technologies.
“Label position” is another useful property. Previously, field labels could appear on top of fields or to the left through a Form component property. Checkbox inputs, however, commonly need their labels on the right side — like when checking the “I have read and agree to the terms and conditions” box. With this new property, you can incorporate this common UI practice into your apps.
In addition, we’ve steadily increased the component areas where HTML can be used in Skuid, and with this release, we opened up even more, like Button labels, Wizard step labels, Header, Message block, Search, and Toast messages. More styling controls are available now as well. Users can now apply margin to each or all sides of a component in the Composer. Our professional service team has been taking advantage of this functionality on every build!
Want to build better Forms? Check out these Skuid Skool courses.
- Level 1: Working with Forms
- Level 2: 5 Tips to Build Better Wizards and Process Flows
Skuid SFX
Skuid SFX, the modern UX for custom Salesforce apps, also received several upgrades during 2023. For example, Apex, Salesforce’s server-side programming language, can now be used to return values used in authentication requests from Skuid’s proxy, allowing for more flexibility for integrating data source authentication into the resources your company has implemented.
In addition, Skuid pages can be deployed within a Lightning web component wrapper using the Skuid Page (LWC) Lightning component, which allows Skuid to function in Lightning web component-exclusive contexts. This capability is currently in beta, and you can find more information on this here.
Skuid NLX
Our “next level experience” app builder platform, Skuid NLX, became available for trial or purchase on the AWS Marketplace this year. Why is that such a big deal? Because the Marketplace is the trusted place for Amazon Web Services users to find the third-party tools and software they rely on to build their applications.
Speaking of applications, NLX now allows users to create a custom domain for their experience. This is a popular feature in the no code/low code space, as customers will see a domain that’s connected to the brand they’re familiar with. With custom domain enabled, just configure hostname in the admin portal, create DNS Records pointing to your Skuid Site as instructed during the setup flow, and activate the new custom domain. Tada!
SSO/SAML Enhancements were an additional key improvement in 2023. Organizations can leverage existing investments in their Identity Management solution from Skuid Apps. They can easily create personalized experiences that leverage user properties for conditional rendering and access control. Applications can also use these properties to enforce security restrictions in the data sources they interact with.
In addition, we added the ability to import/export the SkuidDB schema (Tables) across Skuid NLX sites, letting users easily recreate a SkuidDB instance. This feature improves the experience when using multiple sites as part of a best practices development process (Dev/Staging/Production). Also, we now support the API Key authentication method, which allows you to store encrypted API keys and securely inject them into requests server-side—meaning end users never see those credentials.
Want the full information on the features released this year? Check out our Edinburgh Release resources.
Skuid Skool and certifications
Skuid Skool is where our builders go to expand their skills, gain expertise and experience, and, as of this year, get Skuid Certified! We launched Skuid Skool in 2022, and now we have 63 courses and 16 guided learning paths. Some of our most popular courses include:
- Quick Skuid Recipes
- Import Pre-built Skuid Pages
- Deploy Skuid in Salesforce: Introduction
- 5 Tips to Build Better Wizards and Process Flows
- Battle of the Components: Deck vs. List vs. Table
Our Certification program, released just a few months ago, makes it easier than ever to identify Skuid experts and for builders to showcase their skills. So far, 17 builders have passed the rigorous certification exam.
What’s in store for 2024?
So, what can you expect from Skuid next year? We’ve already been working hard to prepare for a very, very big 2024! Here are some of the major initiatives you can look forward to.
New Skuid composer
A completely new Skuid Composer for the new year! The new interface will be more visual to allow for easier use by citizen developers and will take advantage of common patterns seen in other “builder” environments and web-based configuration products like WebFlow, ReTool, Figma, and Lighting App Builder. Plus, the updated composer will:
- Minimize navigation and other non-essentials to give you more space to do your work.
- Improve the configuration of models, actions, and display logic.
- Organize all component properties so they are more quickly configurable.
- Present a more WYSIWIG canvas and make the index much more essential
- Consolidate some tasks of Skuid building that are currently spread out, like Actions, Display Logic, Modal, and Sliding Panel configuration
Stay tuned, and more will come in early 2024. Contact us for early access.
REST Data Sources
One of our goals is to simplify the use of data sources for customers. By providing a reliable experience with REST that builds on Skuid’s current Skuid DB experience, we can create a single access point for a company's entire data catalog regardless of source.
With the upcoming REST data source enhancements, you can look forward to:
- REST Data Source Console: A centralized workspace to manage requests and objects in the data source, which means no more replicating endpoints on each and every page.
- REST data source actions: The addition of data source actions allows you to trigger server logic with Skuid actions in mind, replacing the need for one-off GET or POST actions on your Skuid model.
AI-focused features
We're working on a Chat component that enables you to connect to your chosen AI language model of choice. Additionally, you can use it for old-fashioned, human-to-human communication, much like Salesforce's Chatter functionality.
Connecting to OpenAI data source will be as easy as entering your API Key and using either our Chat component or these sample ChatGPT pages to replicate ChatGPT functionalities within a custom application.
The future is bright
We are excited that Nintex has signed an agreement to acquire Skuid. We’re bringing together two powerful products — the process automation platform from Nintex and the low-code app dev environment from Skuid — which we believe will help our shared customers move faster, make better decisions, and optimize work across their businesses. We’re looking forward to sharing more exciting developments with you in 2024.
Thanks for a great year
Over the past twelve months, we’ve received great feedback and support from our customers, builders, and partners. It’s your suggestions that drive us to build innovative features and improve our functionality year after year. Happy New Year from the Skuad!
Ready to start 2024 off with a look at Skuid in action? Schedule a demo today.
