Features and Templates UX with growing collections

[bamurtaugh]

Context

Once we opened up the dev container spec, we moved to a model of community-hosted Templates and Features (through "Collections"), rather than a mono-repo where the spec maintainers own everything.

We've seen tremendous and fast-paced growth in our collections, which is very exciting! Though this growth poses an interesting challenge: how do we effectively display these collections in supporting tools without the list getting too long?

Current examples

Supporting tools like VS Code and GitHub Codespaces surface the Templates and Features from the spec's index. While currently effective overall, it'll pose more challenges over time:

• Uncertainty over which Template or Feature to choose - it can be confusing or overwhelming trying to consider what each one does, where it comes from (publisher), etc
• Latency in loading and searching through so many artifacts
• Process of browsing and getting more info is disruptive
  • Brings user to github.com, rather than staying in their editor

Potential solutions

• Sort by verified Templates or Features first
  • Need ability for checkmark for collections beyond those hosted in the devcontainers GitHub org
• Filtering to a more manageable and applicable list
  • i.e. filter by OS, tech stack
• In-product marketplace for getting more info (to avoid being redirected out to GitHub)

Next steps

Share this issue with the community, including in our dev container community Slack channel, to get broader feedback.

[jcbhmr]

I think something like the GitHub Apps/Actions marketplace https://github.com/marketplace is a good place to take inspiration from. In fact, many companies or projects that have community-driven addons/plugins/content use something akin to a /marketplace page. Some examples other than GitHub include: https://vercel.com/integrations https://wordpress.org/plugins/ https://hub.docker.com/search?q=&type=extension https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace

Here's a rough napkin sketch of a marketplace-like thing: https://devcontainers.org/marketplace

Another alternative (less techy, more manual) is an awesome list like https://github.com/vitejs/awesome-vite#plugins or https://github.com/rollup/awesome