Apps

An app is a small website with a job to do. Not your public site, and not a page a fan lands on. Think of a booking dashboard for a venue, a submission portal for a client, a session tracker for your students, an internal tool for your team.

Each app gets three things your main website does not have:

• Its own address, separate from your public site.
• Its own users, who sign up to the app rather than to your fan site.
• Its own secrets and settings, so it can talk to other services you use.

You build the app itself the same way you build your website: by describing what you want to the AI builder. This page covers everything around it.

Creating an app

1. Go to My Website then Apps.
2. Click New app.
3. Give it an App name, for example "Session Tracker".
4. Click Create app.

TribeNest builds the app's front end and puts it live on its own address. It takes a few seconds. You land straight on the app's management screen when it is ready.

Managing an app

Open an app from the Apps list and you get a set of tabs, plus two buttons at the top right:

• Edit code opens the AI builder for the app's front end. It is the same builder you use for your website, so everything in Building your website applies.
• Open app opens the live app in a new tab.

Info

The app's name (change it and click Save) and its address. This is also where you find the app's ID, which you may be asked for when wiring the app up.

Access

Who can use the app, and what they can do inside it.

• Require owner approval. With this on, anyone who signs up sits as pending until you approve them. Turn it off for open self-serve signup.
• App users. Everyone who has signed up, with their status. Pending users get Approve and Reject buttons. Active ones can be suspended, and suspended or rejected ones can be reactivated. You can also grant each user named permissions, which the app itself decides the meaning of.
• Admins. Team members from your TribeNest account who can reach the app's admin area. As the owner, you always can.

Platform access

This is the important one. An app always owns its own data. This tab is about access to your business data: your members, orders, courses, contacts.

• Pause at the top right cuts the app off from your data and from events immediately. Its own sign-in stays valid, so turning it back on restores everything instantly. When something looks wrong, this is the switch.
• Waiting for you lists access the app has asked for, with the reason it gave. Approve or Deny each request.
• What this app can do is a grid of your business areas (Memberships, Products and orders, Events and tickets, Courses, Coaching, Blog, Collections, Contacts, Forms, Donations, Offers, Coupons, Reviews, Affiliates, Deals and documents) with a read and a write switch on each. Read lets the app see that data. Write lets it change it. Turn anything off and the app loses it on its very next request.
• Acting on your behalf holds the two that deserve a moment's thought: Send emails and messages, and Take payments. Only you can approve these.
• Sign-in is how the app identifies itself. Rotate it if you think it has leaked, or Revoke to cut the app off entirely. A freshly created sign-in is shown once and never again, so copy it there and then.
• Events sent to this app is the running log of what the platform has told the app about. Anything that failed can be re-sent for 48 hours with one button. If events were withheld because you turned off a permission the app needed, it says so, and turning that permission back on is enough to resume.

Events

The list of things the platform can tell this app about as they happen: a new order, a new member, a form submission. Tick an event and the app starts hearing about it from now on. Untick it and it stops.

Some events cannot be turned on here because they need access to a whole area of your data, which is more than the event itself. Those say so, and you approve them under Platform access where you can see how much they cover.

Secrets

Keys and tokens the app needs to talk to other services. Give each one a name in capitals with underscores (for example SHOPIFY_TOKEN), paste the value, and save. Values are stored securely and never shown back to you. You can delete one at any time.

Frontend

The app's front end and its address, with a shortcut into the code builder. An app is created together with its front end and stays bound to it, so there is nothing to configure.

Usage

A day-by-day count of how much traffic the app has served. Numbers appear a day after the app starts getting visitors.

Where to go next

• Build the app itself: Building your website.
• Get the most out of the builder: Tips and best practices.
• Store the data your app collects: Collections.