General direction of Flowershow Spring 2023

[rufuspollock]

Agenda for Rufus and Ola big discussion about direction of Flowershow

Direction of travel:

• Flowershow v2
• Flowershow Cloud

Inbox / questions

• mdx-bundler and general approach of importing stuff in markdown ad-hoc

Notes

• Flowershow v2 design https://app.excalidraw.com/s/9u8crB2ZmUo/1YKW635KsAU - NB: more of a very rough sketch
  

Direction of Flowershow - 2023-03-23 (Rufus)

Toolkit / Framework rather than "app"

Flowershow cloud: auto build

Flowershow 2.0 "Next"

Have been piloting Flowershow 2.0 in DataHub Next! (You could see this as a convergence of Flowershow "Next" and DataHub "Next" 😄). e.g. we planned and have already done:

• Switching our render system from contentlayer and flowershow v1.2 (or even 0.9 which is what we actually using) to our new MDX+D pipeline
• Rebuilding our pipeline with all our learnings from Flowershow so far with these differences
• Render pipeline that works with the cloud and specifically remote content
• Data features e.g. table, graph etc
• New content layer (a way to load)

[rufuspollock]

Rufus and @olayway caught up about this last week. Notes upcoming.

[rufuspollock]

Notes from our meeting last week

Insights from our experience with Flowershow over the last months

• We have built 5 sites using Flowershow ourselves
• We have 250 ⭐ and quite a few users?
• On the sites we have built ourselves what have we found?
  • We wanted more a framework
    • Flowershow is useful as a bootstrap ...
    • But also kind of annoying in other ways ...
    • Has got better with v1 (monorepo)
    • But that was where we became a framework
  • At other end of spectrum: users (and our own use cases) where we want something ultra-simple that "just works" i.e. i don't have to do stuff myself (so less framework-y)

Insights 1: build a framework not a template

A framework is:

• Useful library
• Might have bootstrap template and/or scaffolding ... but you are on your own after that
• Some patterns
• Docs ❗
• NB: he more you provide the more you have to maintain

Specifically, Flowershow framework should be:

• Content Layer aka MarkdownDB
• Some helpful components in "headless" style
  • headless style = using tailwind with named color and heading etc
• Markdown processing pipeline including combination of curate and/or bespoke plugins
• Generally most useful thing is actually docs and patterns

Insight 2: if you go the product route, go cloud ...

• just want it to work
• look good
• (future: could have a plugin ecosystem)

This is simple and useful.