A few months ago I’ve started a tiny experiment I called submitter. The goal was to make it easier for people to open new issues on GitHub. You may need to read the dev.to post to know the story in details.
Today I’m sad and happy to let you know that I’m deprecating the experiment in favor of GitHub’s new feature: Multiple issue and pull request templates. Sad to let go my baby experiment and happy to see the team behind GitHub trying to solve the problem.
While GitHub has taken a different approach, it’s still clear that the final project wouldn’t be as helpful as I first thought, so I think it makes sense to stop it now.
In this post, I will share the changes I made and the things I learned when working on my little experiment since the last post.
Auth0 … too much
While Auth0 is very great and simple service, it’s just too much for such tiny thing as mine, I ended up using the old-good passport.js + GitHub.
YAML instead of Markdown
Markdown is easy to write but hard to read correctly by tools such as submitter, no yet. Yes, GitHub has a spec for their implementation, but it’s not really stable yet, I personally encountered some spec errors while trying to make a GFM parser.
On the other hand, I think, YAML is friendly to both humans and machines. So, here is how a simple submit.yml (would live inside the .github folder) would look like:
The for attribute indicates that the field should be visible only when the specified type is selected. Types are defined by the meta.types list. A help text can be specified using the help sub-key or directly assigning a string as a value of a field. That’s it, really!
You can see a live preview of the result here: https://submit.now.sh/to/ahmed-taj/test (you need to login using GitHub)
Draft.js + Markdown = ❤️
For the form inputs, I used Draft.js with some other plugins to make writing Markdown text easier and fun, here is a demo:
Of course when you submit the issue we will convert what you’ve written to pure markdown that GitHub understands, but this part isn’t fully functional yet e.g. for images.
NOTE: If a lot of people would love to see a similar editor for GitHub as a browser plugin I would happily give it a shot!
If you’re curious how the final app would look like, it’s live at https://submit.now.sh (pre-alpha!! use at your own risk). The full source code is also available at GitHub.
That’s all for now, thanks for reading!
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