Remove Creator Showcase from gatsbyjs.org

[tesseralis]

Summary

Remove https://gatsbyjs.org/creators and all links to it.

Motivation

• Its functionality has been partially overtaken by https://gatsbyjs.org/showcase
• It's less code complexity, less images, and will help the site build faster (See: Split gatsbyjs.org into themes #19105)
• The current list of creators skews heavily toward white men (and companies), and isn't representative of the Gatsby community

[fk]

(Thinking out loud after taking a quick look)

There's currently 38 entires in the creators.yml file.

AFAICS the only place we link to "Creators" from is https://www.gatsbyjs.org/contributing/submit-to-creator-showcase/. As I remember things, those contributing guidelines might be the one place where we ever talked about this section of .org? Not sure though …

While my spontaneous vote would have been "yes, let's remove it — this feels like dead code for a (long) while now", the idea (still) makes sense to me. And a couple of things that would increase exposure/value seem quite low-hanging:

• We do map showcase site authors to creators already (and link to showcase items from the creator's profile, see e.g. https://www.gatsbyjs.org/creators/people/lekoarts), but we don't map starters yet.
• We don't link from showcase entries to the creator profile though.
• We already have bespoke guidelines to add to "Creators", and mention the mapping to "Showcase" entries there, but we don't do so vice versa in the "Showcase" contributing guidelines.

@marcysutton @shannonbux @calcsam @KyleAMathews How do you feel about this?

[muescha]

To spin more the idea from @fk:

• Remove the creators index -> redirect to showcase

• Put the current content of creators detail page 1:1 under each schowcase where it is the creator. - If there is more than 1 showcase then list also the other showcases as preview and link.

• (As temporary?) we add a "moved permanent" Redirect from the contributors detail to the first showcase

But:

• instead of a not so much used yaml we can include the content somehow into the showcase yaml?

Or:

• Delete the content at all with no replacement

[shannonbux]

Yeah, I think just deleting it and redirecting to site showcase is a great idea; I wouldn't worry about repurposing the content as long as we notify the 38 people that we're working on a better version of this in the future?

Since it's not linked to from anywhere else, I doubt many people visit it if at all!

[Yofamb]

I'm happy to work on this issue once everyone has decided the best approach

[Yofamb]

I've created a draft pull request with a first pass on removing the creator showcase. All tests pass and I believe i've removed everything. More thought needs go on the redirects.

[sidharthachatterjee]

We've decided to remove the pages and links to it but keep the data for now.

[EnKrypt]

As @shannonbux suggested, I think some sort of notification would have been nice.

I was wondering why the creator showcase was showing a 404 before finding this issue. As of now, it does not redirect.

[Yofamb]

I guess I missed doing the redirect from /creators to /showcase perhaps i'll do a PR for the fix.

[muescha]

i tried to use this splat for an redirect but don't get it work on my local machine with develop and build/serve:

  createRedirect({
    fromPath: `/creators/*`,
    toPath: `/showcase`,
    isPermanent: true,
  })

i see some configurations about the usage of /oldpage/* in the issues, but maybe it works only on netlify?

see #3782 (comment)

For anyone interested to redirect with wildcard, you just need to ensure you have the correct host config (netlify/apache. Gatsby does not really filter it out so it gives us some freedom.

For example:

createRedirect({
  fromPath: "/someLegacyPath/*",
  toPath: "https://newDomain.com/someLegacyPath/:splat",
})

:splat is something specific for Netlify redirects. (see netlify.com/docs/redirects/#splats)
Your redirect won't be "portable" but at least it will work in Netlify.

[sidharthachatterjee]

Just had a chat with @KyleAMathews and we've decided to add the creator showcase back in #20198