Scaffolding for Third Party Plugins

[alschmiedt]

Category

Component gh-pages

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. We need a place to showcase third party plugins. We currently use gh-pages to display our plugins and examples. We would like to use this same site to display third party plugins.

Describe the solution you'd like For a third party plugin just display the README page and add links to the github repository and npm page under "View code" and "View on npm". We should also display a banner or something on this page saying that it is a third party plugin.

Describe alternatives you've considered

• Add an "Explore plugins" page on the developer guides.
• Add an example that uses each plugin. This would be nice, but requires more maintenance on our part.

Additional context

[rachel-fenichel]

Additional information:

• We use Jekyll to make our githb pages content look good
• Jekyll layouts determine what a page looks like
• 'layout' sections in _config.yml set which layout is used for each page
• We currently use a layout named default for examples and plugins
• Layouts grab information from a page object and can use the information in the page (for example, to add an npm link to the correct package)
• This object is called "front matter" in Jekyll documentation
• For our examples and plugins we generate front matter during predeploy, in addition to running builds and copying files to the correct directories
  • Those end up in the examples and plugins folders that you can see if you switch to the gh-pages branch
  • For instance, here's the index page for the block-test plugin before processing by Jekyll

With all this, I think the steps are:

• Put another folder in the gh-pages directory, named something like third-party-plugins
• Add one page per third-party plugin that we want to showcase
  • Either manually added per third-party plugin, or generated from some data file. Manually added would be sufficient until we get enough that it's cumbersome.
• Add a layout that has links and the readme, but not the playground
• Add a mapping in _config.yml to set the layout correctly
• Add links from gh-pages/index.md

[rachel-fenichel]

Note that this is for making it a nice page per third party plugin. A stopgap is to put a link directly in gh-pages/index.md to the correct npm page, and that's a one-liner.