Planning generated SDK entity profile pages for windowsappcommunity.com

[Arlodotexe]

Background

See also

• Community Infra vNext migration planning for windowsappcommunity.com #11
• Appathon Event Tooling #20
• Planning static blog page generator for windowsappcommunity.com #12

Problem

We need website tooling to generate project/publisher/user profile pages that each link to each other.

These generated webpages should:

• Display the fields available (name, description, lists of projects/users/publishers, etc.) in a reasonably styled static webpage.
• Link directly to the pages generated by other entities via path (see IPNS/IPLD/Unixfs path handling investigation #17)

Solution

Assess our requirements, assess our available options, build the thing.

[Arlodotexe]

Reposting planning progress made in the Windows App Community Discord:

Small feedback ask from the community-- To keep our timeline, we could use some tooling recommendations for the new website, namely:

• Planning static blog page generator for windowsappcommunity.com #12
• Planning new static "registered projects" page for windowsappcommunity.com #14

We need tooling that doesn't over-complicate these things. No npm, no complex build systems. Ideally, something we can do via C# and connect to our new SDK directly for programmatic updates.

Any ideas?

• A simple docfx-like markdown renderer and index would work for the blog page.
• The rendering mechanism for displaying registered projects without resorting to a JS framework or build system is more difficult. We should consider generating multiple static pages that link together.

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A conversation between @yoshiask and @Arlodotexe:

I would consider Razor, but I had SEO advantages in mind by doing non-SPA
We should consider generating multiple static pages that link together.

Static pages are also easier to put on IPFS

The pages could be generated and published directly by each user if we wanted, while the gallery view is given by some publisher like our server. That model isn't compatible with SPA anyway.

I say we roll our own tooling

We definitely could. We could even look at generating static pages for each of three published root event stream handlers.
And just build that as an extension of the SDK
So you'd be able to generate a page for your Project that lists all the features, the Users and roles, the Publisher of the project, the dependencies, etc.
Likewise for Publisher, you'd be able to generate a page that shows the list of registered projects, the users and roles on the publisher team (e.g. staff here), and the other data.
and so on for User.
I think I like that idea

I'm thinking this for templating and custom css for styling. No js.
I was considering just rolling our own interpolation-based templates, but I have a hunch this will be useful for other things later.

How would we use this?

It gives us generated data templates
This + vanilla html and css should give us what we're looking for.

I really like the potential this has to let everyone self-generate and link to each other fully selfhosted