Something better than a massive list of everything on the front page

[tonyg]

Perhaps we could revisit the front page entirely. Having a great big list isn't necessarily the right thing at all. What about a "packages of the day", a handful (6 maybe) of packages drawn from a distribution weighted by "most clients" (see this comment), or something? It'd change ~once a day (that way we get the benefits of static/offline for most users). It'd make having good search/browsing facilities extra important of course, so there'd have to be some work done there.

cc @mbutterick @jeapostrophe @jsmaniac @jackfirth

[SuzanneSoy]

I know several members of the community did a cool series of articles presenting various packages a while back. If a bit of manual effort can be put from time to time to customise the "packages of the day", it would be nice to link to a blog article, with a short excerpt and the package(s) in question. Assuming the article authors agree of course :) .

[jackfirth]

For comparison, here's what some other package managers / registries / catalogs put on their websites:

npm (Javascript)

crates.io (Rust)

hackage (Haskell)

pypi (Python)

[tonyg]

I find myself quite liking the pypi approach of just an "update feed" style presentation. It shows activity, it's a reasonable sample, it's not overwhelming, it doesn't rely on stats at all, it's easy to implement...

[jackfirth]

I like the grid layout that npm has, especially since (I think) it can work well for desktops with very wide screens. Something like this:

[tonyg]

A flexbox grid would automatically adjust to width changes, too. Taking, say, the 30-odd most recently updated packages (assuming accurate update-detection :-) ) would nicely fill out the grid on both narrow and wide screens.

@jackfirth, what do the colours mean? If they correlate with some notion of package quality at all, it might be better (for this page) not to distinguish.

[jackfirth]

The colors represent failing to build or failing tests / dependency problems. Personally I'm all for just not showing packages that have those problems in the update feed. Authors could see it as encouragement to get their packages in a decent state, and personally I wouldn't want my package showing up in a "newly released" section of the site while I'm still fixing release issues.

[jackfirth]

Here's something with a slightly less garish appearance:

[jeapostrophe]

I don't feel strongly about this issue, so I'll let ya'll figure out what's best and then I'll help implement it