Flow sharing and certified flows in FlowFuse (WIP)

[gstout52]

Description

This Epic is for creating a FlowFuse 'certified flows' function. The ultimate goal is for customers to create a flow, submit it for review to FlowFuse, and when approved, have it offered as 'certified by FlowFuse' in an internal creator marketplace, where our customers are the creators.

We can use Reforge.com as a model for this: (http://reforge.com/artifacts)

• Members get access to Artifacts
• Artifacts are essentially “how-to” guides, examples of completed work, and similar.
• Artifacts are created by other members
• Number of views is displayed for each Artifact
• Artifacts are included with membership
• Creators get Reforge subscription memberships based on number of approved Artifact submissions
• Offer a ‘Certified expert badge’ for creators whose flows are approved, and a shareable token on LinkedIn
• Approved flows have some commercial value

For a first iteration, we'll see how much appetite there is from customers to (1) share flows and (2) use flows created by others.

First iteration:

• Create a space in Team Library for 'Shared Flows'. All Team and Enterprise teams have access.

Flow export:

• Create an export option from within Node-RED that sends a selected flow to 'Shared Flows', analogous to what is currently in place for exporting a flow to the Team Library. (Alternatively, add a Shared Flow creation button within the new Shared Flows area.)
• Upon export selection, display an alert to the user that they have selected an export location that will be visible to everyone who uses FlowFuse.

Flow import:

• Create Select button to deploy a flow from Shared Flows to a new instance. (This is the same function that we use for Blueprints.)
• For each flow in 'Shared Flows', display the number of times the flow has been imported.

Subsequent iterations:

• Show flows on flowfuse.com.
• Create a search function on the flowfuse.com page, and within Shared Flows in FlowFuse, where users can search by tags for industry, application, and company, and by number of imports. (Leave this for a subsequent iteration if necessary.)
• Create submission form on flowfuse.com that collects submitter's name, company, industry, and the use case of the flow.
• Display the creator's information (name? company logo?) on tiles for each flow.
• Flows can be reviewed by FlowFuse and marked as certified for quality.
• Certified flows can be sold individually or as part of an add-on feature that customers purchase access to.

Which customers would this be available to

Team + Enterprise Tiers (EE)

[gstout52]

After conversation with @joepavitt , for a first iteration we'll make a modification to the Blueprints webpage where users can submit flows and filter between blueprints and flows based on type (blueprint vs. flow) and other filters identified above.

The flow creation form will (probably) need to exist inside of FlowFuse, so some additional digging will be needed on this.

[joepavitt]

How does this overlap with your Certified nodes point in the strategy review @MichaelBDavis? Have these points of conversation come from the same origin?

We also need to consider prioritisation here vs. the other development items we have (and we have a lot of them, especially larger items right now), it's unlikely this will jump to the top ahead of MQTT Broker, Asset Service improvements, bill of materials, etc.

[gstout52]

@joepavitt I understand. For my own planning, do you have an approximate timeframe in mind when you could pick this up?

[joepavitt]

1-2 months realistically. This is a large piece of work anyway, and we're already backlogged until then.

[joepavitt]

I've created two issues for tracking the details here, and how we'd expose this on our website:

• https://github.com/FlowFuse/website/issues/2637
• https://github.com/FlowFuse/website/issues/2638

"Certified Flows" as referred to in this issue, will be merged with our existing "Blueprints"

[gstout52]

@joepavitt Can you clarify the intended hierarchy of the homepage, Integrations page, and Blueprints page?

[joepavitt]

Not sure what you mean in terms of the hierarchy?

Integrations page will be a wrapper for https://flows.nodered.org, and detail our "Certified Nodes", and we can tightly couple Blueprints to the relevant nodes here too, e.g. if you click on @flowfuse/node-red-dashboard, we can advertise a Blueprint to get you started.

The Blueprints page is the collection of "official" flows to get you started in Industrial use cases