I’m working on a GSOC project to add some features to Scaladex to make it easier for potential contributors to find projects to contribute to.
On the front page, I added a section that shows contributing info about some projects. For each project, it shows beginner-friendly issues and links to the project’s contributing guide and chatroom (Ex. https://gitter.im/scalacenter/scaladex). The selection criteria Scaladex uses to pick these projects is if they have beginner-friendly issues, a contributing guide and a chatroom. Scaladex then selects a random sample of these projects (each time the front page is loaded, a new set of projects are shown).
In order for a project to have beginner-friendly issues, the maintainer has to login to github in Scaladex, go to the edit project page and set the beginner issues label field. Then Scaladex will get all the issues that have that label and display them as beginner-friendly issues for the project.
For the contributing guide and chatroom, these will automatically get set when Scaladex is indexed. The contributing guide will get set to a project’s CONTRIBUTING.md file if it exists. The chatroom will get set to a project’s gitter room (gitter.im/{organization}/{repo}) if it exists. Alternatively, the maintainer can set these values to whatever they want in the edit project page.
I also added a Contributing Search page which is similar to the normal Scaladex search page but only shows projects meeting the selection criteria mentioned above and it shows the contributing info in the search results (beginner-friendly issues, links to contributing guide and chatroom).
Lastly, the project page has a Contributing Info panel on the right which is shown only if the project meets the selection criteria.
And one more feature I’m working on is the ability to set which specific issues will be displayed for a project. Right now, it just gets the first 3 issues that were created with the beginner issues label that was set. The new feature I’m working on will display all the issues with the beginner issues label after the beginner issues label is set in the edit project page and then the user can select which ones they want to be shown in the rest of Scaladex.
What do you think? Will these new parts of UI make it easier for potential contributors to find projects and for maintainers to make their projects more appealing to potential contributors?