Maintainers Wanted

[alexwaibel]

I unfortunately have not had nearly as much time to dedicate to this project as I would like recently. When I first started volunteering as a maintainer, I was a college student with a lot more time on my hands. Since starting my career as a full time software engineer, my free time to dedicate to this project has become much more limited.

I would love to take help from anyone interested in the project. While I don't have much time to commit to working on the codebase directly, I would be more than happy to continue to provide mentorship for any new developers interested in taking over the role of maintaining this project. I have plenty of ideas for improvements that I haven't had time to implement. I can continue to provide code reviews and respond to design discussions. Please feel free to reach out to @eduardoboucas and myself in this issue if you have an interest in volunteering on the project.

[alexwaibel]

@hispanic @VincentTam you've both been quite active on the repo so I figured I'd tag you here. If either of you are interested please do reach out. I know I've been somewhat strict with reviews in the past but as a maintainer you'd have a lot of freedom and impact regarding the direction of Staticman. I'd be happy to advise and review but you'd be welcome to take or leave whatever opinions I may offer.

Regardless, thank you to you both and countless others for your help on this project. It's been a community effort and I've really enjoyed contributing and seeing others get use out of this project.

[hispanic]

@alexwaibel Thanks for thinking of me. At this time, I'm going to pass on committing to this. I can see that changing in the future, but not anytime soon.

One suggestion I'll make on behalf of anyone who may be interested in taking this on is for @eduardoboucas and/or yourself to put together a high-level roadmap or vision for Staticman. For example...

• Detail the degree to which a single Staticman instance should be able to service multiple repos.
• Explain who you foresee maintaining such a shared community instance of Staticman.
• Explain the goal/purpose of switching to Lerna (monorepo manager).

Regardless, thank you for the effort you have put into this project.

[jamesmortensen]

Have you guys thought of trying to make this into a business? Getting a paid, subscription-based hosted version of the Staticman API could help you guys make some money from this.

Getting some money flowing inward could help fund development that helps smooth out some of the rough edges in getting this setup on a site.

I'd hate to see this project rot because it's unique, and it uses git and the filesystem as a content database.

[hispanic]

@jamesmortensen Speaking for myself, it has crossed my mind. But, there's only so many things you can pursue at once. Maybe in time, but not at the present.

[alexwaibel]

Thanks for the feedback, I've been putting off replying in hopes I would get time to put together a more detailed roadmap but that hasn't happened so in the meantime I can at least address some of the points that have been brought up.

Single instance serving multiple repos

I think it would be best to continue to allow a single instance to serve multiple repos. It may be the case that a user hosts multiple sites (or shares their instance with friends) and it would be unfortunate to have to stand up a new instance for each. The downside to this is a more complicated per-site configuration.

Who would maintain a shared community instance

Currently there is no officially supported community instance as it was resource/cost intensive to run it. On the topic of monetization, I personally don't have the time to maintain a community instance of Staticman right now and don't have much interest in making money off this, but if a future maintainer were interested I think it's certainly something we could explore. I see a future where we continue to promote an easily self-hosted option via Heroku and other similar deployment platforms, and offer a paid hosted version to users that don't want to go through the work of hosting themselves. The biggest downside to this is that we would need to expend a considerable amount of engineering effort to integrate payments, subscriptions, and auth.

Goal of switching to Lerna monorepo

Eduardo has a PR in progress for this, so maybe he can explain the choice to use Lerna in more detail but I can touch on the justification. We currently offer a simple REST API to interact with Staticman, but we were hoping to also offer other options like the ability to call Staticman via Netlify functions. By converting to a monorepo, we can extract the core Staticman logic and then have other repos that are simple wrappers around that core.

I hope this answers some questions, but I'll try to get a more detailed roadmap posted in this thread when I have the time.