Proposal: reduce number of embedded GitLab Pages templates in favor of project examples
Currently, we have a few GitLab Pages templates distributed with GitLab itself.
There are a few related problems:
- These templates are hard to create: #208713, you need to have gdk and perform a lot of actions.
- They are hard to maintain, if anything is broken, you need to repeat some work from the previous steps.
- Reviews of such contributions are also hard since the reviewer needs to
unzip
archive to see what has been changed.
I agree that these templates are valuable, but supporting them requires some effort.
Suggestion:
- Limit the number of pages templates to a small reasonable number, e.g. 5. And only distribute templates for the top N most popular SSGs + Basic HTML example.
- Modify related guidelines and docs suggesting to contribute to public project examples.
- Go through existing embedded templates, maybe even remove some less useful ones.
Benefits of this approach:
- It's super easy to contribute for anyone.
- Consecutively these templates will evolve faster.
- Our tutorials and landings already point to pages examples.
- https://gitlab.com/pages will become closer to being SSOT.
- Community contributions will take less time to review and merge, not only making everything faster, but also saving some resources on the review.
- GitLab product will have a little fewer bugs. Sometimes these templates become outdated and pipelines start to fail.
Proposal
Add a message in the README of the Pages project:
GitLab only maintains the following templates Pages/Gatsby, Pages/Hugo, Pages/Jekyll, Pages/PlainHTML, Pages/GitBook, Pages/Hexo. To contribute other templates, open a merge request and add a template to https://gitlab.com/pages
Edited by Jackie Porter