The main thing I'm trying to establish here is the dev community's willingness to have their apps on a portal
There is no point creating this if there are no apps/drivers on there (apart from mine) 
Maybe tag some of the other devs in the group so they see this. This wouldn't hurt for DH's too. I don't know how accessible the Hubitat community repository is?
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Searching through the forums for release posts seems inefficient.
A registry of slightly vetted apps would be nice!
The more exposure to each app/driver the better. I'd have just a couple of questions...
- I assume this would be a collection of links, linking to each personal Github?
- How would each developer be able to add their link and description to the site?
- Also, how would developers be able to update the information?
To me, a Wiki is more appropriate for multi-user editing. But if you have a way to do it, I'm all in. 
The plan at the moment is for each dev to have a couple of text files which are automatically imported into a template.
This would build a complete page.
You will be able to update the files easily by updating the text files.
Not all the details are worked out yet.. just an overall idea.
Just really wanting to gauge interest before spending too much time & effort on it
Andy
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been there, done that.. not a lot of real interest.
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Hence the survey
As a user who has looked around at using community developed apps; I think a central, uniform, and organized āportalā of any type would be a huge benefit to users.
Hunting around for information and links is not fun and can dissuade potential users. Just as bad, it keeps current users from knowing about or trying community developed apps.
Even if a portal just has links to individual Git pages, that would be better than searching in the dark.
But itās only as good as the participating devs.
All my apps and drivers will make it to my website, and the content will be maintained but I canāt speak for others.
As @csteele says, he tried the same idea with a github based repository and received little interest from developers.
It wouldnāt be much of a āportalā if other devs are not interested in putting their apps/driver info there.
Andy
Iām not sure about āvettingā
I think atm the only thing that wouldnāt make the cut is webcore 
(For obvious reasons)
Andy
github has what they call GitHub Pages. It's a static website, basically. It's purpose is pretty much identical to @Cobra hubitat.uk site. Documentation of what's in a repository.
GitHub Pages is a static site hosting service and doesn't support server-side code such as, PHP, Ruby, or Python.
In other words, a portal can be hosted on github to document and point to various repositories.
Therefore, the hosting side of a portal is available, two are available.
All that's left is content 
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Might not be hard to show the number of "users" using said app...and a way to like/dislike the app much like any other "store" that's kind of vetting.....
You mean like this?
Andy
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Great idea, however I'm holding out hope that HE implements this in the Hub Portal.
I could see a portal being useful, but threads aren't terrible for announcing new apps and drivers. Ideally the the hub itself should be able to check for updates, perhaps via remote repository integration, and should be able to load relevant metadata (release notes, version info, etc.) from the app/driver repository.
Documentation and release notes should ideally stay near the source code, and developers shouldn't have to update this information in multiple places unless there's a significant benefit. Basically, I recommend keeping developer effort in mind as well as user effort when coming up with a distribution platform. The easier it is to maintain something, the more likely it will be well maintained.
I agree. Update support in the hub would be great, and threads are great for discussing different drivers and apps.
Perhaps each "App" in the App Portal could link back to the parent threads for discussion & support. I should start including that URL in the header section of my releases...
I'd presume most of us keep our code updated in GitHub (I've only ever seen that, and code copied/pasted into threads). So another link to the code (or a button that can automatically copy the text to your clipboard from github?) would be cool to see, as well.
In either case---I'd be sure to include support for an app/driver portal into whatever I release
Not being a developer but being involved in a lot of IT projects that involves user adoptation I can say straight away, that the way that is being described here will have very erratic adoptation.
It's not only about content but that this content is accessible to the user in the most easy and practical way. So as important as the content is User Experience.
From an User Experience standpoint I believe a community drivers and apps store (reachable with the HUB UI) where you would have the following information is the easiest and user friendly way to gain user adoptation:
- Short summary of what the app does or what is the driver for
- With an included changelog for latest version. Versioning will be important.
- Link to download, or ideal a self-Install feature directly on the hub would be nice.
- Link to the support thread on community pages
- Credits and Contact of Developer (optional).
With a couple of exceptions this is pretty much what my hubitat.uk website shows.
- Changelog and version are presented in the app (and shown when an update is offered)
- I don't put my contact details on the website - Contact is available via this forum.
Andy
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Could not resist 
Had to go through it ....
Some thoughts on your website.
First GREAT JOB....
Second it needs some refinement from a UX standpoint.
My personal obeservations:
-The site needs to be mobile optimized, people will leave the site in less than 5 seconds. If you have some level of traffic analysis that shows origin of traffic by browser user agent you should be able to validate this.
-
Some pages are extensively long, people nowadays hate long webpages. For example your 'App Restrictions and Logging" page should have in fact a couple sub pages (one for each restriction for example).
-
Sub-menus are really nice when the child items of the menu are under 6 elements any more than that and it becomes impractical to use a sub menu as solution to link content. I would suggest that you would remove the child items on apps and drivers and create a subpage home for each. Additionally, for example, on the subpage Home for APPs i would create categories of Content, not many just a few more Generic Categories like Security & Presence, Wellbeing and Health ( weather stations, termostats, Air Quality Apps, etc), Etc. Than list each app on the respective category (please take in consideration my previous point about page length and density).
-
Create a Search Function for APPs and Drivers (almost critical for Drivers) which allow users for example to search on the drivers section for drivers by Manufacturer (Aeon,Xiaomi, Etc), by Developer, last update, most used arc
Side note, I do agree with your thoughts on the contact details. I didn't probably explained myself entirely I was referring a link to the developer community profile, to give thanks to the developer
Just my initial thoughts
I had a whole response written last week that, for some reason, I never hit Reply for ... 
Awesome work! I am looking forward to playing around with this later on.
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