HTML embeds really are a gamechanger in my opinion, but I can’t help but think there has been such wasted potential in its execution.
To give you context, I’ve built an automation tool that converts client’s blogs into social media carousels. What was important to me was giving the opportunity for my users to be able to visually see how the social media carousel will appear, whilst also giving them the opportunity to make edits and changes to the text inside of the post. This is why I’ve built a frontend inside of Softr to allow my clients to view posts before approving.
The copy and the images for the social media post is written inside of a JSON structure, hence, I was extremely excited for this feature as it allowed me to actually custom code a preview for my clients.
This is how one slide would look as a JSON:
{"data":{"slides":[{"type":"starting_slide","heading":"Restructuring or Selling Your Business? We Can Help","description":"Discover practical steps to navigate major changes smoothly.","background_image":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dblm1qgrb/image/upload/v1753293162/ai_image/f0ol0mmp9l19yc2i5prt.webp"},
In the attached image, you can see the finished result, I’ve used swiper.js to create a “card effect” carousel for the social media post. The issue that arised for me was that Softr expects your Airtable field to have all of the HTML code, and that it will display it. I feel like this is such a wasted potential to not allow users to write the custom HTML code inside of the Item Field instead of relying on the HTML to be externally within Airtable. You should of allowed users to be able to dynamically add the field name into the custom code (ie. “{{field_name}}”.
I think because of this, the URL embed and HTML embed fields have so much wasted potential. Similarly, for URL embeds, being able to add a “prefix” or a “suffix” to the record data could open a whole word of opportunities. Just for an example, if I wanted to build an article reader, adding this URL before my Airtable Data “clearthis.page/?u=” would return me a clean reader mode experience.
As a consequence, users will have to create airtable formula fields or rely on automations to add custom code into their HTML embed for dynamic embedding. I find this very janky and cumbersome when it would of been such an easy implementation on Softr’s end.
As such, I myself had to rely on custom code to achieve this card preview look. For my own app, I try to work without custom code as much as possible as it is so easy to create conflict with Softr’s native design.
I really would be keen to see this feature added, but in truth, I am unsure how long it would take to realistically implement this. I understand I am not speaking for everyone, but I really hate how often I have to rely on custom code to get over the limitations within Softr.
