Blaze Components package explorer

[mitar]

We could make a site which would be a simple package explorer for Meteor packages which provide Blaze Components. There is an API.

It would be great if we could put into Meteor package metadata somehow a way to display an example of a component automatically in the list. So that it would be more like a gallery of components one can browse through. Buttons, tabs, dialogs, you name it.

Of course this app should be written using Blaze Components. :-)

[Sivli-Embir]

👍

[offthegrass]

There's an open-source meteor package search powered by Algolia. (Angolia has a free plan for community projects)

I made a quick fork and prefixed the query with blaze component.

It works pretty well. We could just manually omit packages from the results if they aren't blaze components.

[mitar]

This looks cool. How could we detect which packages are not Blaze Components?

So one idea is as I described in meteor/meteor#4267, allowing people to add some custom metadata.

How could we show the preview of the component? What I imagine is that it should be a package explorer, but component explorer. So if a package provides multiple components, all components should be listed as a search result. So search results would be two columns. Left one would be preview. And the right one would be short instruction how to use it (which package to add, what is the name of component to include in the template/name of the component class/exported symbol).

How we could do such previews? Load all packages and render them? Put them into iframes and publish for each a simple Meteor app which just render a preview of a component?

[mitar]

Or maybe just ask component developers to provide a screenshot. :-) And a possible link to a demo app.

[mitar]

I made this simple site: http://components-explorer.meteor.com/ :-)

[offthegrass]

    'dependencies.peerlibrary:blaze-components':
      $exists: true

nice!

[mitar]

We should probably do such search recursively (so packages which depend on packages which depend on peerlibrary:blaze-components), but it is OK for now. :-)

Also, probably not all packages will provide components.

We should find a way now to describe which components are in the package. Maybe we could simply have a standard format one should use in README file before first and second heading which is then parsed by Meteor?

[mitar]

offthegrass:testing123

Skeptic! :-)

[offthegrass]

very cool. I'm wrapping all my components in packages anyway, but yes you're right.

I'll think some more about it tonight.

[mitar]

Current code for explorer: https://github.com/peerlibrary/meteor-blaze-components-explorer