Organising packages in a universe

[drmowinckels]

Hi.

During a community call in the spring, I suggested finding a way to organise the packages in a universe in some way.
There could be many types of packages in a universe, and having a way of organising these in the "Build" tab (even maybe in the "Packages" tab, though that might be ott).

For instance, say you have a collection of standard packages, with mainly functions that you'd like to have under a category "packages". Another set which are really just data packages, that could go under the category "data". And yet another set of tutorials or research compendia. Currently, all packages look equal, and it can be hard to tell what is what from the universe. But if the universe json could include a field for categorising a universe's packages in some way that would sort them or something, that would be a very tidy addition.

[jeroen]

Thanks for that suggestion. Perhaps we can combine this with e.g. #68 to allow for customizing the appearance of a universe.

[drmowinckels]

Thats an excellent idea! I really like the suggestion about a landing page through a README.

[ThierryO]

I like this idea. Maybe allow adding categories to the packages.json. And add a categories.json to the repo. I took categories from https://ropensci.org/packages/

We could have a generic categories.json that groups packages at https://r-universe.dev. The categories.json in github.com/organisation/universe would only affect https://organisation.r-universe.dev

packages.json

    {
        "package": "git2rdata",
        "url": "https://github.com/ropensci/git2rdata",
        "category": ["data_publication", "data_extraction"]
    }

categories.json

    {
        "category": "data_publication",
        "description:" "Document and Release Your Data"
    },
    {
        "category": "data_extraction",
        "description:" "Convert and Munge Data"
    }