Winning with Low Code: The Integromat Contest of 2021
It’s amazing what one can do with a combination of Low Code tools and services today. Entire online shopping systems and more are built from the ground up embracing Low Code and in fact, there is even an ecosystem of Low Code freelancers.
I already inherently knew there’s great potential, but never really put up with an interesting Low Code case myself. Only little integration flows here and there to automate some private default tasks.
That was until Integromat started together with NinoxDB a contest in July 2020 and lured me into putting a little more thought into what a complete Low Code solution could look like.
What was being asked for?
Creating a service artists can use to share their work in a “virtual art gallery”, all done using at least Integromat — an integration platform as a service (iPAAS) — and NinoxDB, a Database as a Service (DAAS).
So what did I build, then — and why was that interesting enough to win that contest?
How it works, as explained to the users — the artists
I created a video explaining how it all works and put it on a Wordpress site that gives more context and features the actual virtual art gallery.
Not only is that very website the go-to destination for viewing submissions, it’s as well where artists would go to in order to submit their glorious artwork.
Why should they do that? Now, as the explanation video says, the virtual gallery takes care as well of dispatching the artwork to various social networks and performing the “drum rolling” every artists needs. After all, why create art if nobody sees it? (As things stood, only Facebook and Pinterest. It’s just a showcase, right?)
The technical solution explained
- There is a neat website pulling in photos from a Facebook (photo) album (on a Facebook Page). It uses a default Wordpress theme. And it acts a first touchpoint for interested artists — the “main frontend”, if you will.
- The website done in self-hosted Wordpress, in this case hosted via a Bitnami VM — hey there, Bitnami Marketing! — from the Azure Marketplace and deployed in Azure, has plugins, so called “Add-Ins”, for Zoho Forms and EmbedSocial. EmbedSocial embeds the Facebook album photos mentioned before. You could say, it’s that plugin that displays the pictures from Facebook Pages in Wordpress. And why a self-hosted Wordpress? Simply because self-hosted Wordpress offers more options to include (free) plugins than wordpress.com. Deploying a Wordpress site via the Azure Marketplace is a matter of minutes and good enough for a short-lived solution.
- Zoho Forms is the entry point for artists to send in their work.
- An Integromat flow makes sure all captured data is stored and distributed to the right services.
- Ninox has all the meta-data and the unique file name can be used to query the file on a single Dropbox folder at any given time.
- Speaking of which, Dropbox is the (Digital) Asset Management System if you will. This is where the artists submissions reside, independent of the Facebook album. (Which could be seen as a low-control DAM as well.)
- A Facebook album is where all the viewing and sharing and liking happens, and in case of our little eye candy website it’s where the displayed pictures originate from!
- Ninox at this point has the purpose of acting as data hub for all future products based on the art (meta) data available as well as for integrations; for example you can imagine: an art inventory including dashboards, an art search functionality, backing up a Chatbot, creating automated social posts or using the data for marketing purposes eg in newsletters
- To demonstrate this, I am pushing uploaded pictures to a Pinterest board in the submitted Integromat Flow, using Data from the Ninox DB meta-data store
- Again, many more actions and routines could be added based on that meta-data — the sky’s the limit!
The won contest
Using my alter ego “Alois” I submitted the whole solution and won the contest. It was really good fun, take me maybe two days in total including coming up with a submission idea. And the Business Tier of Integromat it earned me for one year was great to have! Thanks again, Integromat!
Showing how a working solution that’s extensible can be built from scratch in no time, without any hassle studying each and every service API.
In fact, managing all the available properties across the services was really straight-forward.
With that Business Tier at hands, I created many sophisticated scenarios in Integromat. Follow me on Medium to read more on some advanced tips and tricks. And remember, be it (the) serverless (conundrum) or be it Low Code — architecture never ceases to matter. Connect with me and check out my articles on LinkedIn for the grand scheme of things. I’d love to know how you are using Low Code and what your thoughts are. Please share, be it on Medium or via Twitter or LinkedIn. Gaia is watching!
