Collaboration: emberaddons.com <> emberobserver.com

[gcollazo]

I recently became aware of emberobserver.com, a great project which also lists ember addons.

The project has some obvious overlap with emberaddons.com and in the spirit of open source collaboration and building shared solutions for our community, I reached out to @kategengler so we can decide how to help each other.

I will update this issue once we have a chance to chat and exchange a few ideas.

[stefanpenner]

👍 Let me know if their is something i can do to help facilitate

[gcollazo]

Today I had some time to start working on the new design merging emberaddons.com with emberobserver.com.

This is just a first draft (scores missing) but it should help start a conversation on the approach that we want. Later tonight I will work on a search results page and an addon detail page. Feedback welcome.

CC: @kategengler

---

Home design

---

Score badges

[stefanpenner]

@gcollazo nice!

[kategengler]

Interesting.

@gcollazo, Before you work on it, I'd like to note that emberobserver doesn't have a search results page, just a fancy autocomplete.

Is it worth it to merge the sites before adding new features? I personally think it would be easier to merge if the only thing we do is merge existing functionality. Thoughts? @gcollazo @stefanpenner

[gcollazo]

@kategengler

What I'm suggesting with "the merge" is that we take the search functionality currently present in emberaddons.com and move it into the emberobserver.com app. That way we end up with both features (quick search / reviews + scores) in a single app we can both contribute to.

My objective whit this designs is to end up with a good UX that incorporate both feature sets.

Are we on the same track?

[kategengler]

@gcollazo

Ah, I didn't understand that (using the search functionality from emberaddons.com) as a goal of merging. I might be misremembering (or maybe misheard, the audio quality was tough) it but I thought we preferred the autocomplete/search from emberobserver.

I agree on having both feature sets in a single app that we can both contribute to, too. I'm just suggesting we do not add any features not in either app as part of "the merge".

[gcollazo]

Ok, just to be extra clear. By "the merge" you are suggesting that we take what you have on emberobserver.com and apply the new design that I'm suggesting above and publish to emberaddons.com.

Once that's done we can move forward and bring back the search feature from emberaddons.com to your app.

I'm I understanding correctly?

[kategengler]

No, I'm pretty confused now.

I think we need to figure out what features we want the resulting site to have from the two.

I'm suggesting we don't add features like 'Most popular addons' in that process that neither site seems to have currently, we also don't quite have 'Best score by category' and I think that would take some thinking because there would be many ties.

[gcollazo]

what features we want the resulting site to have from the two

This my wish list:

• Having the best possible experience for Ember users looking to find the best and most commonly used addon for "X". (Score + Downloads)
• The site should help users make an informed decision about what addon to pick. Ember Observer's score and reviews already do this.

From Ember Observer:

• Categorized database of addons with reviews and scores.
• Users will be able to browse the addon list by categories and sub-categories.
• Addon detail view. Ember observer already has this. This is great for sharing.

From Ember Addons:

• Users will be able to perform quick search of all the addon names, descriptions and author names. This is what the emberaddons.com does now.
• Search results page that is sortable by name, author name, score, download count and update date.

New Features (home page):

• Updated and unified design similar to what we have on emberaddons.com. IMO it looks more like an "Ember site" because of the color scheme. Also consider getting a custom Tomster for the site.
• Most popular addons list. This will help users identify the most popular addons installed by other Ember users across all categories. I would exclude addons bundled by ember new my-app command.
• Recently updated addons list. For me this is a small reward to addon maintainers for keeping their code updated. "If you update your addon you will be featured on the home page."
• Best addon score by category (top 3?). This will help users get a sense of what the community is using to solve a particular type of problem. I would decide which are the best addons by picking the addons with the best score and then take into account the downloads count.

@kategengler What's in your wish list?

I'm suggesting we don't add features like 'Most popular addons' in that process that neither site seems to have currently

I agree that we should not add features initially. I also think that at some time in the near future we should add more functionality like the features I proposed on the design. See the "Proposed Next Steps" section at the bottom for how I would do it.

we also don't quite have 'Best score by category' and I think that would take some thinking because there would be many ties.

Maybe we should just select the 3 most downloaded from the highest scoring addons for each category. I believe this would break most ties and reflect what are the most popular addons with the highest score for a given category.

Proposed Next Steps

1. Do a quick update of Ember Observer's styles to match the Ember.js color scheme. (@gcollazo)
2. Point emberaddons.com to Ember Observer's hosting and rename the site to Ember Addons. OR. Redirect emberaddons.com to emberobserver.com. We should ask for input from more community members. In my mind the question here is what's the best possible domain for the site. (All ask for community feedback and make a decision based on that feedback, @stefanpenner update emberaddons.com DNS if necessary, @kategengler rename site if necessary)
3. Update Ember Observer's design to be more aligned with my proposed design. OR. Ask the community to submit design proposals that take into account the features we want to implement in the near future and pick from there. (@gcollazo HTML and CSS OR coordinate a community effort to get design proposals, All pick the winning proposal)
4. Add the search feature from emberaddons.com to Ember Observer. (@gcollazo client side, @kategengler and team on the Rails side)
5. Implement "Most Popular Addons" and update the home page. (@gcollazo client side, @kategengler and team on the Rails side)
6. Implement "Recently Updated Addons" (@gcollazo client side, @kategengler and team on the Rails side)
7. Implement "Best Addons by Category" and update the home page. (@gcollazo client side, @kategengler and team on the Rails side)
8. Dance like nobody is watching 💃 💃 💃 (All)

This is my best attempt to propose something I hope we can agree on. What do you think?

[kategengler]

I'm good with 1-4 and 6. I'd like to discuss 5 and 7 further though.

Re: 1. The color scheme change is fine as long as we can keep high readability.

Re: 2. If domain changes to emberaddons.com, I will need to redirect emberobserver.com and update github badges markdown & images. Not a problem, just a note about what needs to be done.

We're already working on adding a full text search of addon names, descriptions, author names and readmes as an additional page to emberobserver.com

I'm not sure being sortable by download count is of much use and am somewhat hesitant to encourage that as a metric. The score takes into account download count to allow popularity to have a modicum of influence, but only awards a point for being in the top 10% of downloads. For the same reasons, I'm not really sold on a list of 'Most Popular' addons, but we can discuss new features once we manage to combine the existing functionality from both sites.

As for my wishlist, things I want Ember Observer to do in the near term, in addition to the better search and listing recently updated addons, are:

• Further categorization & cleaning up of the boundaries of existing categories
• Providing a way to list compatibility with ember versions
• Static analysis of addons to further inform and evolve reviews / automatically review addons
• Addon to allow self-reporting answers to review questions
• Provide lists of addons needing contribution (documentation, tests, etc)

[lazybensch]

Its awesome to see how much thought you two are putting into this. I really think the resulting project, as do both existing projects right now, will play an important role for the ember ecosystem. Its just another thing that we can point to and say "hey, look what we in ember land have!" :-)

I would like to add my two cents to it. I don't know how representative my opinion is but at least i am using both projects multiple times per day and maybe you can get some input about what is important to a user.

when do i use emberobserver?

I visit emberobserver usually from monday to friday, at least once a day. I am working on an ember app in my day job and whenever i am confronted with a new challenge, i usually go to emberobserver to check out the relevant category for my problem ( for example template helpers ) and get inspired about what is out there. Sometimes I find some suitable addon and use it, sometimes i find one that at least pushes me into the right direction and i go build a solution myself from that.

when do i use emberaddons?

Daily, seven days a week, multiple times a day. Emberaddons is like one of my news channels. Everytime I have a few minutes i check emberaddons just to browse through the first 3 sites of recently added addons. I check the readmes of the ones that sound interesting to me even though i don't have a specific problem i need to solve right now. This way I always now whats going on in the ember addon world. I know about exotic ones that I may want to use once i get to a related problem but that i would never have found if i would have had the problem and just looked for an appropriate solution.

user experience

Ok lets start with emberaddons design. I browse to the site, and see a list. Thats exactly what i need! It's like a twitter feed or facebook wall, you can imediately start browsing and lose yourself in that list while finding interesting addons. Actually, for me this is so important that if the new project loses that, i would have to run my emberaddons fork locally to browse for addons in the future ^^.

Its hard though to search for a specific solution, the search has become better now but you can still miss addons with unfortunate names that would solve your problem. The only way to solve this is the way emberobserver took; categorizing addons.

Emberobservers categorization is the single most important feature for me on that site. I really don't care that much about the scores honestly but i will elaborate on that later. The key point is, i would like to see categories as the core piece of the new project.

scoring

I do like the scoring in emberobserver in the way that i really believe it encourages addon maintainers to write better quality addons. Especially that you get scores for test coverage and the like. We should keep that. The community only profits from this. As an addon user however, the score only adds very little value to me. You could have a really good, really popular addon that has less points just because it only has a single maintainer, or one with a very high score and test coverage and all but was released 3month ago and has 5 downloads (which usually is the case when there already is an community-excepted addon out there which is eating up all the downloads). Download count is important for me. When i need to choose between 5 datepicker components and one has 20 times as much downloads as the second best, this is a strong indicator that i have found the canonical solution to my problem. I want that information. However this only works when applied on a filtered set of addons. Just sorting all addons or all addons of a big category for download usually doesn't add that much value.

The scoring process I use goes like this:

• find a set of competing addons
• when were they released / last updated
• what download distribution do they have (taking release into account)
• what do their READMEs say
• what emberobserver score do they have

my dream project

This is how i would want the resulting project to be.

• emberaddons.com as domain name. It says what it is. If you don't know it and search for something like it in google. you immediately get from the url that this is what you are looking for whereas emberobserver could also be a news site or blog.
• the simple addon list, presorted by most recently updated addons and really nothing else. As mentioned this is super crucial to me.
• categories as filters. I would love to see the categories as simple badges under the search input field. you can click on one or mutltiple of these badges to filter the list for addons in that/those categories. You really don't need a description for each category.
• word search. As it is implemented right now in emberaddons should stay, if you filter for a category you can filter further by addons matching your search term
• emberobserver scores as a new column. next to download count, so that you can decide for which of these you want to sort
• nothing else! this is another important point, i would like if there is nothing else. no "best addons" or "best addons in category" glitter that is distracting from that single list. we can represent the most relevant addons inside that list by filtering and sorting properly.

I hope this is of help to you. Also I would really like to help if you two need some. There were a few things i wanted to add to emberaddons but since the planned merge i am a bit blocked ^^ so i would love to assist in getting the new site up asap.

[esbanarango]

👍