Get Aurelia Great (GAG - call for action)

Hi @jonathan.eckman

I like your approach to problem solving (If I end up in source code trying to figure out how to use a feature, I plan on documenting it to make the next devs life easier), because I am doing the same for the last couple years since I am actively involved with Aurelia. A few blogs (formatted as Gitbook

are examples of the areas of my interest, confirmed to be of value to Aurelia community. Rather than writing these documents alone, I decided to accelerate that work, by soliciting collaboration from the community as stated in my first post in this thread.

I am trying to formalize this effort by creating the Editorial Board, defining format and structure for community created documentation, place to propose new documents, management of ongoing projects, etc. As this will take some time, I wanted to find a few motivated developers to tackle some of my existing “books”.

I understand your point of view and it shows your passion about the framework. Something I’d like to do is to add aurelia in this comparison repo: https://github.com/webcomponents/custom-elements-everywhere/issues/50 it bothers me to not see it in the list!

I’ll keep an eye on what you are planning todo.

@enrico-padovani: your idea for helping is as good as anything I am trying to do, with the caveat that it intersects a bit more with core team activities than writing samples and related documentation.

Thank you for this conversation.

@adriatic I feel like we’ve done some pretty awesome stuff with Aurelia recently where I work, but I’m finding it difficult finding time to write about it.

What’s the absolute simplest, most direct means of posting helpful Aurelia content? I do not mind if someone repurposes my word vomit into something beautiful.

Side Q: Is it still acceptable to post about cool Aurelia stuff on a personal blog, or should it go elsewhere?

Hi @alexdresko

Let me start with Side question: in the ideal case where the complete design and schedule for Aurelia Documentation would be already in place, we would not be discussing this subject. So, while it is just fine to post cool stuff about Aurelia anywhere, having it in a central location with good support for search seems like a very good first step leading towards full integration with the http://aurelia.io site.

I am pretty sure that your idea about “limited participation” where you write the articles usinh shorthand (that we can design for this task) would be well received. As mentioned before, I am anxious to organize the creation of the “user level” (software developers) type of documentation, so if your shorthand is created with that intent in plan (and would not mind helping along the “technical writers” team if / when they get stuck with your texts), we have a good step forward.

I’d like to see a PWA guide. I feel like PWAs are becoming more important and Aurelia is lacking in this story.

I’ve tried a few times, but as others have said I haven’t had a lot of concentrated times. Here’s my existing question on SO that doesn’t have any answers yet.

I also put out a post on this Discourse.

Here’s a related Github issue.

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I’m interested, although I’m not sure how useful I can be.

I’ve made one decent application in aurelia and played with it for the odd little other personal project. I haven’t needed to look through the source code (which is a great credit to the team!) other than for the cli and generally have kept to the docs, and where I’ve done something I thought was a bit non-mainstream have chucked it on my blog https://winterlimelight.com/tag/aurelia/

Thank you for spearheading this. For some reason I thought that Aurelia might be withering away.

I personally have not done anything except some playing around with Aurelia. I was not planning on using it because it does not seem to have the momentum that other frameworks are having (this may just be my perception and not reality.)

I do not believe I can contribute because I’m not using the framework. I have been learning React and ASP.NET Core 2 using the SmartAdmin template located https://wrapbootstrap.com/theme/smartadmin-responsive-webapp-WB0573SK0

In my opinion, SmartAdmin would be a fantastic starting point for an Aurelia version. I do not work for MyOrange, who wrote SmartAdmin. I will contact them to see if they would be willing to invest some time making a version using Aurelia. I seriously doubt they will consider my request. If that is the case then perhaps someone from the community would be able to convert the React version to Aurelia.

Thanks,
Dave

I’m interested, although I’m not sure how useful I can be.

@winter_limelight - I plan to provide enough topics (information in how to help), create polls for other community members to provide their ideas on what all might be needed, and create the editorial board (a few community members and a few core team members) that would select from the pool of tasks having the overal benefit for aurelia in mind.

Note: your blog points in the center of my own favorite domain (Aurelia applications Identity Management (aka authentication and authorization), which is not nearly enough covered and I have spent relatively a lot of preparation time to write about this topic.

Hi @Dave

I do appreciate your remarks a lot. My own fear that people not yet immersed in Aurelia world might develop the idea how Aurelia is withering, is the key motivator that led me to organize the community to help addressing the most important actions that community can do without disrupting the core team’s work.

You are presenting me with a catch-22 case, which hopefully still can be resolved - as you might be the guy who can “port” SmartAdmin template the collection of Aurelia templates. Creating such collection and writing technical documentation for it is a perfect example of a project for GAG - and since I know SmartAdmin app I can tell you that making it Aurelia based would not be too difficult.

The following is the email thread I had with MyOrange last night:

Me: Hello, would you consider doing an Aurelia version of your product?

MyOrange: We might in the future, right now there isn’t much demand for it in the bootstrap community.

Me: Thank you for considering it. It’s kind of a catch-22, having it in your product would definitely create more interest in Aurelia. I do have a couple of more questions. If me or someone else converts your React version of SmartAdmin could they contribute the Aurelia source code to you? What type of licensing would this individual need to do that?

Waiting for a response from MyOrange. Interesting that we both used the catch-22 phrase :slight_smile:

Hi all,
thank you for this honesty and this impulse to do something. I have been considering for some time how I could support Aurelia.
Im using Aurelia since 10/2016 private and in business - from small POC’s to Enterprise scale - and have the strong desire to “give something back”. Im not a native english spaeker so i think documenting is not the right choice for me.
I somehow read an issue (or simillar) about “Hosting the Aurelia UX Showcase should be done”. I think i could do this - this would match my free-time. What are you thinking about that?

Oh, of course i could share “tons of examples” of sources…

Hello @cusdom

Very few of us in the Aurelia community are native english speakers (i know many more that are not, myself included). While I do not want to push you into the area where you are not comfortable, let me point out that writing technical documentation in the context of “Aurelia community writers movement” does not mean necessarily writing manuals for Aurelia framework. I proposed Aurelia CLI knowing that it is a critical part of Aurelia that is least documented (because it is the newest).

Your own suggestion (Oh, of course i could share “tons of examples” of sources…) is a perfect example of a potential contribution, where you are still expected to write the tutorial like document that explains these samples. I envision that all kinds of samples are indeed extended framework documentation, activity that is at the core of Aurelia Community contributions.

Please do stay tuned in this and related doscussions as I am preparing the context in which our subsequent discussions would be easier to conduct

@Dave - I am not surprised by the response you got from MyOrange - it is the same I got hundreds of times from various vendors. The solution is really in our hands, assuming that we can muster sufficient amount of work ourselves. As an example, I will point out the Commuity work resulting with three significant contributions - adding the integration between Aurelia framework on respected GUI toolkits:

The first two were designed, implemented, tested and supported by members of the (Aurelia community) group Aurelia-UI-Toolkits and became sufficiently popular that a relatively big company (Syncfusion) decided to create the bridge of their own GUI SDK to Aurelia, with their own developers, guided by our members, and using our own “bridge framework”.

This experience tells me that we would be better of by tackling the work on SmartAdmin assuming that:

  1. Our internal poll (to be created yet) confirms that there is interest in this template
  2. We find at least one community member who is interested in doing that work

The Community members will most certainly help with anything that needs a bit of pushing ahead.

We successfully integrated Aurelia with AdminLTE with relatively little pain. That’s one of those things I’d love to blog about but 1) I wasn’t sure if anyone would care, therefore 2) I haven’t made the time.

@alexdresko @Dave

I great example of immediate benefits from a structured discussion. Whether to call it a blog or tutorial makes a little difference, although I think that in the context of our new home (aurelia community space) the title tutorial is a better descriptor. It should appear in the category of “integrated with aurelia … / tutorials”.

The very first thing that I plan to add to our new site will be the supports for polls - the best method to discovers whether anyone would care.

Just thinking out loud, but I’d really like for any new documentation to be part of the aurelia.io/docs. One place for all teh things.

@alexdresko @adriatic

I for one care a great deal. There are so many frameworks to choose from. The tipping points for me are longevity, documentation, real-world templates and samples, third-party commitment, active community, stability, performance, memory consumption and leaks, saturation. I have been burned by committing a large amount of resources into a full-stack framework (Lightswitch) and I don’t want to make that mistake again.

I have been putting off any front-end framework and will be concentrating my efforts on back-end Web API’s. But, eventually, I will be looking seriously into a framework.

Please blog about your Aurelia integration. I think the community would benefit tremendously.

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@Adriatic

Syncfusion is a wonderful company. Offering a free community edition and publishing free ebooks. I wonder if they would be interested in building a SmartAdmin-ish template using their controls. The benefits could be huge for both Syncfusion and the community.

I’ll be interested to see to results of the upcoming internal poll.

Here is the last response from MyOrange concerning SmartAdmin:

You can contribute with any type of license, however, if you are thinking of posting the contributed code on a public git, I think you will need the Extended License. For a private git, you can use the single or multiple app license. Please find all info on license usage here: http://support.wrapbootstrap.com/knowledge_base/topics/usage-licenses