Algolia or lurn.js search approch

[matbrgz]

I would like to start this discussion, I do not know if it has already started but we have to talk about how to implement a search engine for this amazing site.

[pixelastic]

Hey, Tim from Algolia here. I was actually thinking exactly the same thing and came to see if you guys would be interested :) cc @bdougie

I forked the repo already and I think pushing to Algolia the textual data of each generator + the GitHub data shouldn't be too hard. We could then order results based on their popularity (number of stars and Netlify compatibility), and allow for filtering based on the main language, the available template languages and their licenses.

There might be a bit of work on the design side involved (we might need to add a sidebar, so maybe the 4 columns display won't work as well). We recently helped update the yeoman search. Maybe something similar would work here?

Looking forward to see what you think of the idea :)

[erquhart]

@pixelastic I've sort of inherited oversight of this since Brian Douglas moved on to GitHub. Love your idea, Algolia search would be fantastic. Pretty open on the design side, this site is due for some love in general anyhow. We've been trying to keep this site and headlesscms.org on the same footing, eventually spinning out a base project that can be used to create open source leaderboard sites, so a redesign here should apply in general for the leaderboard concept.

[pixelastic]

Great!

So what I suggest is that I'll give this a spin on my side, pushing data to an Algolia index and tweaking the design to fit a new facet sidebar. I'll update this issue with what I came up with.

If the experiment works, we can then start to see how it can be incorporated into the base repo and into the deploy mechanism. WDYT?

[erquhart]

Sounds great, looking forward to it!

[erquhart]

@pixelastic update: I migrated the site from the old Middleman setup over to React Static, which should hopefully make an Algolia integration more straightforward (since everything is JS now).

[pixelastic]

Thanks for the update! I might not have as much time to deal with this PR as I would have imagined, though.

I'll keep an eye on the issue and will try to do something when I'll have a bit more time :)