Idea : provide a more centralised widget repository

Grist Feedback
1

I discovered Grist two days ago so sorry if this has been debated already.

I really think you need to consider a more centralised or at least organised repository for widgets. Think of wordpress plugins.

You could define a kind of json based format that would contain various fields (author, licence, compatibility with grist version, title, description, unique slug, link to repository) that widget authors could add in the root of their widget repository.

Than allow authors to submit their widgets to some central db. You could also track the number of installs, and provide the most used third party widgets in the hosted version of Grist.

There is a security concern, you won’t have time to audit all the widgets, authors can change the code at a later stage and add malware, but if you track the usage, you can at least audit the 20 most used third party or so and give your approbation to include in the hosted version. I think you do it already but it’s too little dare I say.

If you want the third party widgets to grow as much as it should (imvho), this would be a very welcome coordination effort. Tracking widget usage could also be done with the telemetry you use, including for self hosted versions.

Thank you for the great tool with the best compromises/decisions so far compared to everything I tested.

2

Hello and welcome. You’ve hit upon a great idea and identified some of the challenges.

There’s a Grist document that I maintain that aims to collect community widgets with a modicum of curation. It also supports suggestions for others to add/update info as they’re able. I know there have been other community-led initiatives as well.

I’d love to build out a more comprehensive solution eventually, but hopefully this helps somewhat.

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Didn’t there use to be quite a few more widgets in this document?

4

There are! It seems there’s an odd issue with this document. I’ve temporarily disabled suggestions so you should be able to see the whole roster. Thanks for the heads up!

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Would it be helpful if I try to make a more detailed proposal?

I think we can learn from composer, wordpress ecosystem, maybe Arduino libraries (let’s be wild), and other package systems.

Not that I ‘m an expert in this field, but it’s interesting to look at and learn in the process.

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For sure, though I can’t guarantee anything in terms of delivery. I started building out a voting/recommendation system in the Grist doc itself but had to move on before I had it working unfortunately. I was trying to keep it vanilla Grist, but there’s plenty of flexibility in terms of visualization/interaction with a custom widget.

I’d also check out GristHub for inspiration.

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Hi @Philippe_Jadin !

Totally agree with your idea and that was my goal with GristHub indeed! I finally took some time to revamp my document and go towards my goal. You can see more details here.

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