Creator roadmap for the rest of 2022

Creator roadmap for the rest of 2022

Hi everyone,

Hope you're all good!

Thanks for continuing to make this community engaging and informative.

Today we'd like to share with you our plans for the near future of Creator.  We always strive to strike a good balance of features and enhancements to cater to the different segments of the Creator audience. While we've got some exciting features lined-up that you've been expecting from us, we're also thrilled to announce that there are a few surprises and some key market differentiators as well!

The following roadmap gives you the gist of what's coming up, and more details about each feature will be posted here as we close on the various release dates.

Read on to know about the features planned to be rolled out during
Quarter 3, 2022.

AR library
We're delighted to announce that we'll soon be bringing augmented reality (AR) in Zoho Creator! The AR library enables you to set up an immersive augmented reality experience for your users. An application can have 3D objects in its AR library, which can be accessed via AR fields and annotated in the real world using compatible iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. This real-time digital interaction provides better data visualization and enhances end-user experiences, providing you with exciting new business opportunities.

Released on: Sep-2022

Company logo
Your apps will soon be able to better reflect your company image with customized branding details. With this feature, a
company logo and favicon can be uploaded and will be displayed when you access your application in live.

Released on: Oct-2022

Theme colors
The color scheme of an application not only makes it more attractive but also keeps it distinct from your portfolio of other apps. With this update, you'll be able to select a color of your own choice for your application theme, to make them visually more appealing and maintain branding guidelines across apps.

Released on: Oct-2022

Application fonts
Font choice plays an important role in the readability and aesthetics of an application and determines the brand perception. With this update, you'll be able to choose fonts from a predefined list, as a part of theme customization.  You can also choose different fonts for different form factors, like web, mobile, and tablet.

Released on: Oct-2022
Reference: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/creator/developer-guide/applications/articles/set-theme-for-your-application#Choose_Font

Push notifications
Notifications are the modern-day solution to keep your users informed and engaged. Push notifications are a powerful means to reach your app users anytime, whether or not they are in your app, to capture their attention and reengage them. Creator notifications are undergoing a major makeover to support real-time notifications for approval workflows, blueprint workflows, and record comments across web, mobile, and tablet devices.


Form titles
Interaction with forms can become more meaningful when we have contextual information. We're going to introduce form titles that'll enable you to set different display titles for the two primary actions in a form — adding a record and editing a record.  

Released on: Aug-2022


Dark mode for Android
Yes, you heard it right! We're going to extend dark mode support to Android apps. Dark mode, which is great for low-light situations and is easier on your eyes, will be automatically enabled based on your default system settings.  

Released on: Sep-2022

Blueprint analytics
Understanding the performance of a
blueprint workflow and gaining insights to optimize its efficiency is a key aspect of every business management process. We'll soon be introducing blueprint analytics to provide vital information like average time taken per blueprint, average time taken per stage/transition, total number of transition occurrences, etc., to give complete insights into your apps' blueprints.




Custom connectors
Prebuilt services available in Connections help you seamlessly integrate your Creator application with various other cloud services. In certain scenarios, organizations might have unique requirements that would require usage of other third-party connectors, not supported by Creator. Such integrations can be achieved by adding them via custom connectors.


To know about the features planned to be rolled out during
Quarter 4, 2022, scroll further!

Custom AI models
AI fields in Creator make your applications smarter by utilizing advanced machine learning techniques. Custom AI models can help your applications become more intelligent using custom-trained OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and object detection algorithms, based on the images you upload.  Custom-trained OCR makes predictions and processes written text from digital images into machine-readable text.

Released on: Feb-2023
Reference: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/creator/developer-guide/microservices/ai-modeler/articles/understand-ai-modeler#Model_Types


Pop-up subforms
Vertical scrolling is conventional and intuitive when working with subforms that contain numerous fields. This feature will open a subform in a pop-up while adding and editing a row, which ensures better user experience and space management.    

List-type subforms
We're introducing a table-like subform without inline inputs, which looks similar to our list report. This is suitable for subforms, that you expect to experience less-frequent modifications and have a large number of line items.

Subform custom sorting
Using this feature, users can manually reorder the row sequence of a subform, while adding and editing records. This feature is great for use cases beyond field-based ordering, when the fields in the subform need to be sorted in a specific order.

Form cache
At times, a user might close the browser window or navigate to another component accidentally while filling in a form. To avoid data loss in these scenarios, we'll be storing the form data temporarily, so that users can continue from where they were when they accidentally left the form.

Blueprint Deluge tasks
Programmatic controls for blueprint workflows help automate business processes. We'll be introducing Deluge tasks to change the stages and transitions of a blueprint. Also, blueprints will be automatically initiated for records added through Deluge.

User connections
Workflows involving connections will soon prompt user authentication when accessing applications in live. This will help identify the exact user using the third-party services, and permissions will be applied based on that service.

Extensions
Zoho Marketplace is a unified platform that hosts low-code apps published by developers that can be utilized by clients on multiple platforms. In the Marketplace, you can now publish one or more app components, which can be installed into existing applications. For the first phase, widgets can be published and installed into an existing application.

Early 2023 releases

We are excited to announce a few of our features that are expected to be launched early next year!
    
Canvas builder
We'll be introducing a Canvas builder for creating flexible and visually appealing detail views of reports. In the initial phase, this builder will be supported only in the web interface.

Subforms in stateless forms
With this update, you'll be able to add subforms in stateless forms. Since stateless forms don't store any data, users can use subform insert row, clear row, and access field Deluge tasks to manage subform data.

Advanced email analytics
Gaining insights about emails sent from your apps can help complete the email notification life cycle. To achieve this,  we'll be introducing advanced email analytics that'll inform you about delivery status, enable recipient activity tracking, and provide you with a detailed log to improve email performance powered by Zoho ZeptoMail.

OTP login
Portal users who don't have email addresses will be able to use their phone number as an alternate method for signing up and signing in, with OTP-based authentication.

Login template
Creator offers a default and robust design for each of the customer portal pages, which you can further customize using the portal page designer. With this update, we'll be supporting prebuilt templates and additional customization controls for portal login, signup, and reset passwords pages.

Deluge editor
Similar to your application IDE, intuitive error messages will be shown in the Deluge editor while scripting itself i.e. before saving your script.  Apart from this,
customizing keyboard shortcuts, full screen mode and a few other enhancements are on the way.

App installation setup
Installing applications from the marketplace requires basic information to guide/setup the user configurations.  For example, this includes selecting the timezone, date format etc., Using predefined configurations before publishing apps to marketplace will help users during the installation process.



We appreciate that you have all been patient with us. It's your continued support and understanding that motivates us to keep pushing our boundaries and add exciting new features.  Also, we are aware that some of your requests were not fulfilled at this time, but please be assured that we are still working on them.

We hope this announcement post will help you in planning your upcoming projects and apps in advance. Finally, please note that there could be small changes to the scope of these features and release timelines, but we're committed and confident that we'll be able to deliver on all the exciting updates we've announced.

Wait! This isn't the complete list. We have even more surprises cooking in our labs, and can’t wait to share all of that with you! So stay tuned and keep watching this space for updates. Meanwhile, do keep using Creator and keep the feedback coming!
 
Prakash,
Product Management,
The Zoho Creator team.




    • Recent Topics

    • Reading from and writing to Zoho Projects Custom Module with Deluge

      Does anyone know if there is a way to read from and write to the Custom Modules that Zoho now supports. I would love to be able to loop through a set of data and create the entities I need to for this new custom module I'm looking to put together.
    • How Does Knowledge Base Search and Article Recommendation Work?

      Hello, I would like to understand how the Knowledge Base search engine works. Specifically, does it search based on: The article title only? The full article content? Both, the article and the content? Keywords? Tags? Also, how does the system determine
    • Importing into Multiselect Picklist

      Hi, We just completed a trade show and one of the bits of information we collect is tool style. The application supplied by the show set this up as individual questions. For example, if the customer used Thick Turret and Trumpf style but not Thin Turret,
    • Zoho Books/Inventory - Restrict Items With Pricebook

      Hi Zoho Team, I'm trying to address as use case where a client needs to restrict which products certain customers can purchase. I have been able to find a way to do this based on the current Zoho Books or Zoho Inventory configuation. My feature request
    • Best Way to Integrate Zoho Campaigns with Amazon SES Without Third-Party Tools

      I am looking for the most seamless and efficient method to integrate Zoho Campaigns with Amazon SES. My goal is to avoid using any third-party automation tools like Zapier, Make, or Pabbly, and instead, leverage Zoho's native capabilities for this integration.
    • Release Notes | January 2026

      We have rolled out a set of powerful new enhancements across Zoho Vertical Studio that bring several long-awaited capabilities to your applications. These updates focus on deeper customization, smarter automation, better reporting, and improved usability
    • How to charge Convenience fee OR payment gateway charges to the end client who is paying the invoice?

      Hello, I am creating this topic after having discussions with various sets of users and have understood that with people moving more and more to digital payments, it is important for the client to enable the "Convenience fee" kind of scenario. I have
    • Card payment surcharge?

      Hi, I would like to offer my customers the ability to pay invoices by card (using the PayPal integration). However, PayPal charges me around 5% to receive a card payment, and I would like to pass on this cost to my customer by way of a card payment surcharge. Is there any way for Zoho Invoice to be set up to automatically add a defined "card processing fee", say 5% of the invoice total, if the customer elects to pay by card? I don't want to add this on to invoice manually, since most of my clients
    • Automate Credit Card Surcharge

      Is there a way to create an automation that will add a 3.0% credit card surcharge to a subscription whenever a customer pays via credit card?
    • Zoho Books | Product updates | January 2026

      Hello users, We’ve rolled out new features and enhancements in Zoho Books. From e-filing Form 1099 directly with the IRS to corporation tax support, explore the updates designed to enhance your bookkeeping experience. E-File Form 1099 Directly With the
    • Notifications Feeds unread count?

      How do I reset the unread count on feeds notifications?  I've opened every notification in the list.  And the count never goes to zero.
    • Zoho POS App Hanging Issue – Sales Becoming Difficult

      The Zoho POS app frequently hangs and becomes unresponsive during billing, making it very difficult to complete sales smoothly. This commonly happens while adding items, during checkout, or at payment time, especially during peak hours. These issues cause
    • Tip #62- Exploring Technician Console: Send Ctrl + Alt + Del- 'Insider Insights'

      Hello Zoho Assist Community! Imagine you are a technician supporting a remote employee who cannot log into their system. The computer is stuck on the login screen after multiple attempts, and the user is unsure how to proceed. Instead of walking the user
    • SKUs for Invoices, POs, etc.

      It doesn't appear that one can enable SKU display on invoices, POs, etc. This is problematic, and I don't see a good reason why this shouldn't be an option. Some of our vendors and customers use this in their system. Every other identifier code is available
    • Introducing Bigin's Add-in for Microsoft Outlook

      Hello Everyone, Email is an important way to communicate with customers and prospects. If you use Outlook.com for emails and Bigin as your CRM, the Outlook Add-in helps you connect them easily so you can see your Bigin contact details right inside Outlook.com.
    • how to avoid duplicate customer

      How can i avoid to create a duplicate customer. I charged a same customer with two different plans and it showed up twice in my customer list and subsequently in Zoho books contacts. It creates confusion to have a same customer appears multiple times in customer or contact list. How can i avoid it.
    • RSC Connectivity Linkedin Recruiter RPS

      It seems there's a bit of a push from Linkedin Talent Solutions to keep integrations moving. My Account Manager confirmed that Zoho Recruit is a Certified Linkedin Linkedin Partner but does not have RSC as of yet., (we knew that :-) She encouraged me
    • im facing issue on generate the Estimate price

      i couldn't understand what is the issue , i cant generate Estimate price where is the issue
    • cannot be able to add user

      Dear team I tried to add a new user for sales team, but after entering the OTP its showing error message cannot add now
    • Changing an existing item to different accounts & inventory-tracked

      Hi everyone, I have an item in Zoho Books that was originally set up as a non-inventory item. Over time, I associated it with different sales and purchase accounts, and I now have many invoices, bills, and reports that use this item. My business process
    • New 2026 Application Themes

      Love the new themes - shame you can't get a little more granular with the colours, ie 3 different colours so one for the dropdown menu background. Also, I did have our logo above the application name but it appears you can't change logo placement position
    • How do I edit the Calendar Invite notifications for Interviews in Recruit?

      I'm setting up the Zoho Recruit Interview Calendar system but there's some notifications I don't have any control over. I've turned off all Workflows and Automations related to the Calendar Scheduling and it seems that it's the notification that is sent
    • API keys not showing in ZeptoMail dashboard

      Hi there, I'm hoping someone can provide some assistance as support isn't replying. I am trying to configure my transactional emails, but the dashboard doesn't show any of my API details - the `div` is there but it's emtpy. Every time I click "Generate
    • Bookings duration - days

      Hi team, Is there any way to setup services/bookings that span multiple days? I am using Zoho Bookings for meeting room bookings. Clients may wish to book a room for more than one day, for up to a month.  If not, is there a plan to allow services to be setup with durations of Days as well as hours and minutes? Many thanks, Anna.
    • Empty folders are now appearing in the sidebar...

      ...and the folder list is now auto-collapsed by default with no way to change. Neither of these recent updates are useful or user-friendly. ==================== Powered by Haiku https://www.haiku.co.uk ====================
    • big 5 accounts

      how do you find what accounts are listed as Big 5 ?
    • Zoho recruit's blueprint configuration is not functioning as mapped

      Current Status: Zoho Blueprint is not functioning as configured. Issue: We are moving a Candidate status in Zoho Recruit "for active file" but we encountered: "Status cannot be changed for records involved in Blueprint." This happens to various client
    • Actual vs Minimum

      Hi all, I am sure I am not the only one having this need. We are implementing billing on a 30-minute increment, with a minimum of 30 minutes per ticket. My question is, is there a way to create a formula or function to track both the minimum bill vs the
    • Delay in rendering Zoho Recruit - Careers in the ZappyWorks

      I click on the Careers link (https://zappyworks.zohorecruit.com/jobs/Careers) on the ZappyWorks website expecting to see the job openings. The site redirects me to Zoho Recruit, but after the redirect, the page just stays blank for several seconds. I'm
    • How to add interviews through API

      I'm trying to add an interview without much luck. The documentation gives examples of adding just about everything except an interview. However, the issue might be the way I'm formatting it, because the documentation is unclear to me. It seems as if the xml should be passed in the url, which seems unusual. I've tried the data as both plain and character escaped, but nothing seems to work, nor do I even get an error response. https://recruit.zoho.com/recruit/private/xml/Interviews/addRecords?authtoken=***&scope=recruitapi&version=2&xmlData=<Interviews> <row
    • Can't scroll the page down unless I refresh the page

      Hello, This issue has been going on with me and a lot of other users in my organization, we can't scroll down! the scrolling side bar doesn't appear and scrolling down through mouse or keyboard keys doesn't work, it seems that the page just ends in the
    • Offer already made- but I withdrew it

      I made an offer letter, but made a mistake on it. I withdrew the offer but now I can't recreate the correct offer. Zoho keeps saying that "A same offer has already been made". I look in the "offers" and there are NO offers (this is the first time I've
    • Control the precision of answer bot responses

      Hello everyone, Admins can control the precision with which the Answer bot analyzes and generates a response by adjusting the threshold levels. Based on predefined threshold values, Zia analyzes how closely the query matches with the available KB articles.
    • Rebrand your CRM with the all-new custom domain mapping setup

      UPDATES TO THIS FEATURE! 19th Jan, 2024 — Custom domain mapping has been made available for portal users in Zoho One and CRM Plus. 23rd June, 2023 — Custom domain mapping has been made available for all users, in all DCs. Hello everyone! We are elated
    • Add Israel & Jewish Holidays to Zoho People Holidays Gallery

      Greetings, We hope you are doing well. We are writing to request an enhancement to the Holidays Gallery in Zoho People. Currently, there are several holidays available, but none for Israel and none for Jewish holidays (which are not necessarily the same
    • Sender Email ID is duplicate

      My sender id "automate@erplaunchpad.com" is coming as duplicate but I have not used it anywhere else please help
    • CRM x WorkDrive: File storage for new CRM signups is now powered by WorkDrive

      Availability Editions: All DCs: All Release plan: Released for new signups in all DCs. It will be enabled for existing users in a phased manner in the upcoming months. Help documentation: Documents in Zoho CRM Manage folders in Documents tab Manage files
    • Building Toppings #6 - Install and uninstall actions

      Hello Biginners! In our previous forum post, we explored creating connections - specifically, custom service connections in the Bigin Developer Console. In this post, we'll focus on another feature that can be used in every topping: install actions. We'll
    • New UI in Zoho One CRM

      Hello, Just switched to the new UI for Zoho One CRM, do not like it, especially the search functions. What are the steps to backstep to the previous UI? UPDATE: I found it.
    • App like Miro

      Hi all, is there a way to have a interactive whiteboard like in Miro? We want to visualize our processes and workflows in an easy way.
    • Next Page