Add listing for unofficial open source, Shopify-related projects.

[gavinballard]

Hey guys,

I think http://shopify.github.io/ is a great idea, and I love the execution. Just wondering if you guys could see some scope for adding a filter for Shopify-related open source projects that have been created by the developer and designer community.

As an author of a couple of libraries and tools, I've found that discovering other people's projects, as well as getting my own out there, has been a bit difficult. It also leads to the same work being done repeatedly (check out how many Grunt plugins wrapping the shopify_theme gem there are). It would be great to have a central list of those projects that we could refer to, and potentially encourage folks to collaborate on existing tools together.

Thanks!

Gavin

[qq99]

I like the idea :+1:

[gavinballard]

Great :). What's the best way forward? I'm happy to start collecting a list of existing open-source projects.

[qq99]

Honestly, I'm not too sure. For Shopify-related repos that aren't already in the Shopify org namespace, it seems easiest would be moving them into the Shopify org. Of course, maybe you want to have a CONTRIBUTORS.md or something to let others know the project origins?

If it really should remain separate, I'm not sure what to do in that point. It goes a bit above my department

[gavinballard]

I can see some issues with that - both repository owners not necessarily wanting to hand over their projects to the Shopify organisation, and Shopify not wanting to take on what would essentially be some form of responsibility for third-party projects.

I know that right now, the list of projects on http://shopify.github.io/ are pulled in automatically from the GitHub API... I was more thinking about adding an alternate listing that used a similar display mechanism, but pulled its data from a fixed JSON file or somesuch. Then if someone wanted to add their project, they could make a PR against this repo and the maintainers could have a quick look to see if the project met a decent level of quality, then pull that in.

[qq99]

https://github.com/Shopify/shopify.github.com/blob/master/javascripts/custom-repos.js#L44 can you add your repo in there?

[gavinballard]

I'm sure that it could, but then it would be appearing alongside all of the "official" Shopify repositories, and I'm not sure that would be desirable from Shopify's perspective.

If there's someone at Shopify that can green-light that, that's great - otherwise I imagine there'd need to be a bit of customisation done to the site.

[cshold]

That 'custom repo' list is meant for ones still owned/operated by Shopify, not just endorsed.

I do like the idea of a collection of third party projects. My hesitation is that we'd need to more actively maintain and monitor the third party listings. That, and it opens a question about what the requirements are for being included and how we handle those we don't want to include.

[gavinballard]

Hey @cshold, thanks for weighing in. Yeah, I can totally understand a reluctance to take on something that would mean time moderating and monitoring third party libraries and I definitely wasn't thinking that just adding them to the existing list would be the right way to go about it.

Having and enforcing eligibility guidelines is pretty tough, too.

Maybe this would be something better started outside of any "official" Shopify channels, and if it has any legs Shopify could look to give it some sort of endorsement.

[cshold]

I think that would be a great approach. No doubt it'll get some legs - as you mentioned the number of shopify_theme wrappers alone is pretty impressive.

[gavinballard]

Cool.

Thanks @cshold and @qq99 for taking the time to respond :smiley: