Feature: Add landing page to Odin Project Org on GitHub

[ChargrilledChook]

What

It's possible to create custom landing pages for organisations on GitHub, similar to custom pages for user profiles.

Why

Leveraging this could be a nice way to collect and signpost important resources, as well as create a nicer experience for learners looking to contribute / explore our GitHub.

How

To do this is a relatively simple process; we simply need a repository named .github with a README.md file to house the landing page. It would require someone with admin access on GitHub to create the repo.

I've provided a rough sketch / draft implementation below as a proof of concept; note most of the content has been pulled out of other repos / parts of the site. I'm not married to any of the particular details of this prototype.

If this is something we're interested in doing, I don't think the first version needs to be gold plated - simply having visibility on the feature will likely encourage more people to contribute to it.

Todo

• Admin to create a .github repo
• Iterate on initial design / content

References

Docs
Example in the wild

[ChargrilledChook]

Welcome To The Odin Project!

The open source, free, community driven pathway to launching software careers 🚀

About Us

The Odin Project (TOP) is an open-source curriculum for learning full-stack web development. Our mission is to provide a comprehensive curriculum to learn web development for free. We help users learn the skills and build the impressive portfolio of projects they need to get hired as a web developer.

Curriculum

Our curriculum is divided into distinct courses, each covering the subject language in depth. Each course contains a listing of lessons interspersed with multiple projects. These projects give users the opportunity to practice what they are learning, thereby reinforcing and solidifying the theoretical knowledge learned in the lessons. Completed projects may then be included in the user's portfolio.

Lessons are structured through a combination of original written content and a compilation of carefully curated resources from the web. This is where the contributing happens!

The Odin Web App

Our web app repo houses all the code that powers the Odin website - a lovingly crafted and community built Ruby on Rails application. It works by pulling in the markdown text files housed in the curriculum repo.

Our Community

Learning web development will be a long and arduous journey, but you can make the marathon a lot more fun by getting involved in our Discord community. No matter what pace you are doing our curriculum, there will always be people a few steps ahead of you that are willing to help. Furthermore, helping others that are a few steps behind you is a great way to deepen your own understanding and make your learning stick.

We are working hard to update existing lessons and produce new content, so we would love to hear your feedback on the lessons and projects. We hope you find the lessons fun, engaging, and informative and find the projects challenging but achievable. So please let us know your thoughts!

Join the discord here! Linky?

How to Contribute

Here's a brief summary about how to contribute to curriculum content! Here's another line explaining what to do to request features on the app. You could also check out the contributing guide!

[01zulfi]

I personally would like this to be much more shorter than the above. I'm not particularly sure about having the "Curriculum" and "Our Community" section, or maybe a much shorter one.

And, would love to see this bad boy somewhere lol:

[ChargrilledChook]

@01zulfi agreed on both counts 🚀 it's very much just a prototype, I wouldn't be against making it much more minimal - I think the GirHub example I linked is a sweet spot for size

[thatblindgeye]

I'd agree on shortening some things, but I definitely think having this landing page would be great for putting the "how to contribute" stuff up front. The community section I think could omit the second paragraph entirely, and I'm not sure if we'd want to link directly to our Discord here or just link to the Community page on the site or something.

I think this would also be a good opportunity to revisit our repo descriptions as well, but also mentioning on this landing page where you should go to make what kind of contribution could be good as well. "If you want to contribute to any lesson content, the curriculum repo is for you!" and "If you want to contribute to the functionality or styling of the web app, go to our web app repo", etc.

[ChargrilledChook]

The community section I think could omit the second paragraph entirely, and I'm not sure if we'd want to link directly to our Discord here or just link to the Community page on the site or something.

Agreed, it was mostly padding + it's taken straight from the Foundations community lesson. Given the community page thing is in flux maybe I'll leave it out for now until that forms a bit more.

I think this would also be a good opportunity to revisit our repo descriptions as well, but also mentioning on this landing page where you should go to make what kind of contribution could be good as well. "If you want to contribute to any lesson content, the curriculum repo is for you!" and "If you want to contribute to the functionality or styling of the web app, go to our web app repo", etc.

Definitely 💯 , I think the signposting is the biggest value add here

[ChargrilledChook]

PR for initial implementation here, I think this is fine as a v1 but also happy to iterate a bit before sending it live

TheOdinProject/.github#1

[dm-murphy]

@ChargrilledChook Great stuff all around here!

This could be another spot where the new mission statement could be helpful once that's been finalized.

Any thoughts about trying to emphasize our community and our people on the landing page too? For example we could link to the Maintainer team as a way of showing visitors the people behind the organization.

I've had another idea about updating our contributor recognition and it may or may not be helpful on the landing page as a way of motivating other contributors. We have the outdated hall of fame on the site but I think keeping up with something like a list of top contributors of the month could be helpful too. If we can show more appreciation of our contributors we could boost our retention and motivate first timers.