ACA Side Topic - Proposal: templates.aeolusproject.org

Matt Wagner matt.wagner at redhat.com
Wed Jun 20 13:45:58 UTC 2012


On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 04:46:36PM +1000, Andy Fitzsimon wrote:
> So building on this,
> 
> Here's a rough architecture of pages

Sorry for not responding sooner. I've been kind of eagerly awaiting your
response, and Justin's reply made me realize that it's been sitting in
my mailbox for a week. :-[

> # Login screen
>   * oauth: google / openid, facebook, twitter  etc

As a login screen, I think this is good.

The placement in this set sort of implies that you need to log in before
you can do anything. I had kind of imagined that 95% of people would
"just" grab a template, and only 5% of users would actually create any.
So I think requiring login for normal operation would just be a barrier
to entry. (I'm not sure if you're actually suggesting that they should
have to log in before downloading templates and whatnot, though.)

Can you actually use GitHub as a login source? That would be neat!

> # Gallery page  ( default page )
>   * Pagination
>   * Categories

I like the graphic for single image versus multi-image deployables.

By "Categories", do you mean the Newest/Popular/Highest-Rated sort of
categories you show, or do you also envision a more hierarchical layout,
e.g., "Web apps", "Financial apps", "Game servers", etc.? (Those are
terrible categories on my part, but you get the idea.)

My fear here is that, initially, I don't think there will be any
templates. We'll seed a few, and hopefully others will come along and
contribute a few. But I think, even if the project gets some traction,
it will be a while before we have any great number of templates. I think
categorization is a great idea, but I worry about spending too much time
on it if the categories are just going to be empty.

> # deployable template screen
>   * Rating / 'liking'
>   * Links to templates
>   * Click to view / (edit if owner)
>   * Download
>   * CommentsS

I like this view. A few thoughts:

- The names "Deployable" and "Template" are maybe not the clearest
  things we could use. Though I imagine that using different names than
  in the app would be terribly confusing, and I hardly intend to suggest
  that we should change the names we use in-app again. I wonder if
  there's something slick you could do with icons here, to make it clear
  that a template described how to build an image, whereas a deployment
  was how to launch one or more images built from templates?

- For the "Download" and "Clone" buttons, I have this baseless feeling
  that the ordering should be flipped. I tend to expect the button on
  the right to be the "default" action. (Maybe something with coloring
  could help too?)

- I had to stop and think for a minute what "Clone" would do. I like the
  idea, though I don't know if it should be a "Version 1" requirement.

> # template screen
>   * Rating
>   * Download
>   * Click to view textarea/ (edit if owner)
>   * Comments
>   * Used by ...(deployables)

Looks good! Though with the same comment about download/clone as above.

> # New template screen
>   * Upload button
>   * Edit from boilerplate in textarea

I like the from file + from URL options.

I wonder about the utility of editing a boilerplate template. It seems
like we'd want people to upload existing, tested templates, while a
"edit this boilerplate" form would invite people to make it up on the
fly.

Sidenote: This makes me realize that we probably need to *validate*
these templates when they're uploaded, both for syntax and to make sure
that they reference something useful.

> # New deployable screen
>   * Upload button
>   * Edit from boilerplate textarea
>   * Select template from gallery populated list

I missed this screen, but this sounds good, except for the boilerplate
comment above.

> ==============================
> 
> 
> There is some potential duplication of features here for what would
> make a perfect conductor start-here-page.
> Imagine being greeted with a screen that says:
> 
> "new template (upload/edit)"  and  "select from templates gallery"
> 
> the "select from templates gallery"  - no idea yet on how to best
> present this

Yes! Loving this idea. Or at least incorporating parts of this into our
app.

-- Matt



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