[RFC] Moving forward and priorities

🚀 Maintenance update releasing after this weekend (week of August 12th). After that we’ll work on closing/merging the remaining PRs, and then regroup and figure out what’s next from the list below.

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Hello everyone!

If you have followed #1259, you’re aware that nozzle.io no longer actively backs this project. One of the main clients and projects of XP Bytes heavily relies on a company-fork of react-static; because I and by proxy the company really would like React Static to be completely Open Source and a community effort, you can see the repository is now owned by the react-static organisation.

For the foreseeable future, I (and perhaps others in my company) will actively contribute and dogfood react-static and we’ll extract features out of our platform and merge the back into this project, similar to how Basecamp feeds Ruby on Rails. It will take a while for me, and the rest of the team, to get up to speed with everything currently outstanding, but I am planning to set-up a project board to transparently communicate with you all what we think the next steps forward are.

Right now, I’m listing a few of the current open RFCs (#1199 #1180), that are still considered, will list out a few of my immediate priorities and open up the conversation. I would ❤️ it if everyone who relies on this project could tell me at most three things:

• What current 🐛 bug is actively hindering you (issue linking please!).
• What current 🦄 feature is currently missing and you really want (issue linking please!).
• What 💎 “nice to have” you think is on the top of the list of things that are “nice to have”.

(It’s helpful if you use these emojis to indicate what you are referring to).

On my priorities list:

• Merge / Review open PRS
  • specifically #1219 and fix CI,
  • #1196 #1250 #1253 #1254 for path handling,
  • #1222
  • #1226 which fixes #1220 and #1239, and
  • #1181.
• Review the current codebase
  • consider dropping unused packages
  • consider partially upgrading some to TypeScript (won’t affect you at all)
• Get e2e tests up and running, even if it’s just a smoke test.
  • fix CI
  • have at least a smoke test for the main package
  • have proper tests for the plugins (!!)
• Consider the next major update to use @react-static/* to clean up node_modules.
• Get the CONTRIBUTING up to speed so it’s easier to contribute.

Let me know what you think! 🚀 🚀 🚀

EDIT: Once this list is complete enough, I’ll do a release. I’m discussing with others what the best approach is, but basically I think we’ll have one of these RFCs for each major version going forward, so you can all tell me what ya want 😉

Yes, build stabilisation should be worked on as well.

[DDunc]

I’m grateful for all the work @tannerlinsley has put into this project and I’m also really glad to see the handoff is starting strong! I expect there will be some adjustment period at first but I think some consolidation is going to be a good thing for preserving and growing the existing community.

To +1 some things that have already been mentioned and articulate a bit more:

• Documentation and Examples: The v5 docs were extensive, the docs site worked well and there were a huge number of helpful examples and starter repos within react-static create that were fairly stable. Visibly getting back to that level for v7 is important for bringing in new users and making the “upgrade or migrate to a new framework” decision easier to make. Putting http://react-static.js.org or similar back up would be helpful as well.
• Test Coverage: More unit and integration tests for existing code will have a lot of benefits for both contributors and users, and could be a great starting point for community members who haven’t contributed before and would like to gain a better understanding of the underlying code. This can feed right into improving the documentation for contributing as well.
• Comprehensive Upgrade/Migration Guide: Several of my react-static projects are still on v5.9.12 because v6 was a little unstable out of the box for awhile and we were blocked by bugs we didn’t have resources to fix ourselves. Some documentation already exists, but more assurances that all past use cases are definitely working for v7 as an up-front guarantee would go a long way. Conceptually the upgrade path is pretty clear and not too much work, but there was some trepidation about upgrading react-static versions that’s not totally gone yet. Recommendations on best practices for switching an existing project to react-static from another SSR framework would also drive adoption.

I’ve found the above to be stumbling blocks at times when trying to increase usage of react-static within an organization. Once these were overcome though, feedback has been universally positive from both react devs with limited SSR experience and from backend devs with no react experience, which feels like react-static’s sweet spot.

I think what exists for new users now is already good, but making it even better with a little more polish would be a quantitative addition that makes a qualitative difference.

I’m very excited to see what’s next for react-static!

[david-boles]

Hello! No opinions to express; glad the platform I just decided to build my site on in going to continue being developed. Hopefully I can take on some issues in the coming weeks 😃