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In other words a way to branch to/from a Community file


Hi everyone,

I publish a design system (DS) to the Community and have frequent updates to fix issues and add/update components.


Community members duplicate this DS to their Organizational account to use in their own projects. They have reported to me that once they import the Figma file into their org and use it as a library they have no way of getting my latest updates easily and without breaking changes into their production design files that refer to the original “duplicated” file.


So it would be great if there was a way to publish “get latest” or “subscribe to changes” in a community file. (Instead of having to restart design file from scratch in the latest version of the Design System).


Librairies features are not an option as they are specific to an ORG and cannot be accessed through the community. And Swapping in this use case does not work well at all.


This would be great for everyone as it would allow Figma to always ship with latest official components from the big design systems from Apple, Google, Microsoft and any other design system available in the community.


(If it mean anything Sketch has had this feature for years now)

+1, updating files should not be this much of a pain. And yet…


We need this…


+100, library maintainers would have much more incentive to update their community files, and those downstream who consume third-party eng libraries would have a chance to keep their Figma assets in sync.


Community libraries would be a huge win for those working on enterprise-grade software but don’t have the bandwidth to roll their own design systems.


Super +1 to this! This would be a very welcome feature to the already amazing family of features 🙂 Our team will greatly benefit from this. Currently we use a large open source design system from the community which is updated fairly often. For us to keep it in sync requires to republish the design system which takes a very long time.


This is very compelling!


Wow! Nice idea! +1 certainly!


Love this idea!!


Looks like this request no longer exists.


Hello @Erik_Goens1

What do you mean by:



Looks like this request no longer exists.



Both this current thread and the one linked in the comment above yours seem to be active. This one has 99 votes and the linked one has 9 but they share the same idea imho. Did I miss something?


Cheers


Any plans to support this?


There is ConFig 2024 coming up fast, so I’m crossing my fingers we will see updates around the overall Figma Payment API experience and this feature would make sense to drive sales imho. 🤞


I agree that this is a critical feature that needs to be added to Figma. IMO it should work similarly to Github and npm packages. Users should be able to install community files locally as a project dependency and when updates are made to the project have the option to accept incoming updates.


From the publisher’s perspective there should be a way to maintain multiple versions of the project file. For instance a beta version with the newest in development features and a stable version for the current features. Additionally, they should be able to create branches off a feature branch and merge feature branches into a main branch.


The current system of only having a main branch and secondary branch is very limiting when it comes to committing larger feature changes. The process described above would help maintain projects better.


One last thing, like Github there should be a way for community members to contribute to community projects, report issues, and review requests for changes.


Does anyone know if Figma’s partner UI Kits (seen in screenshot below) are able to achieve these live updates? I can see you can add their instances to your design without having to duplicate the library into your files. If so, it would be great to open this ability up to the public.



That is an excellent point and could be the way home from this massive pain point. ❤️ 🙏


Yet we can’t change colors yet on these UI kits so I think we are a long way from allowing people to work in a productive maner here, hopefuly it’s just a beta issue that they will resolve soon.


This would be huge for me. My current project requires me to use the Salesforce Figma UI library, but there’s no way for me to automatically keep my file in sync with the Salesforce community file; I have to periodically check if they’ve updated it, download a new copy of the file, then re-link all the assets in my existing files to the assets in the new instance of the library.


What’s the procedure to re-link the assets?


Hi @dannymartucci

I think you may have posted your question in the wrong thread. No worries just an FYI.


If I’m incorrect could you elaborate on your scenario?


In the proposed change above, branch-users would either “accept updates from main” or reject them following the same process you already use when working on multiple branches of a file in Figma. Branch-users could also submit a merge request to the main-branch-user, if accepted this would add then give the option to all the branch-users to “accept updates from main” again.


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