Randomize order of themes

[daattali]

This is an issue I've been wanting to open for jekyllthemes.org but it didn't make sense there because of pagination.

I think it's a little unfair for any themes that are not the last ones to be added that the order is chronological, because I assume most come to the site and look at the first few rows and the further down you scroll the more people you lose. Since all the themes are shown on one page, I think it'll be pretty easy to randomize the order of the themes on each page load. It could even be done with javascript.

I'm not sure if you guys agree with this idea or not, just my two cents.

[jacobtomlinson]

I've thought along similar lines and I did raise an issue on jekyllthemes.org along these lines a while back.

My ideal scenario would be to sort by date added automatically but then allow reordering alphabetically (which looks like it's already there), and by stars on GitHub. That would require some interesting scripting and may end up having to be a build time feature as I'm sure GitHub wouldn't want us making multiple API calls for every page load, however that conflicts with my desire to keep this simple GitHub pages with no build scripts.

Random could also be good as it would allow less popular themes to get to the top of the list.

[erlend-sh]

Yeah, I like the simplicity of a randomised order.

I don't really like the common practice of pushing the repos with many stars to the top. It's a bit of a "the rich get richer" sort of thing; you're rewarding the repos with good publicity with more publicity.

If I were to suggest a more advanced approach for a later iteration, I'd go with something like:

Randomise order within 4 different groupings (not necessarily with visible headers on the page) based on "freshness" of the code:

• New (theme was updated in the last 2 months)
• Recent (2-6)
• Aging (6-12)
• Old (12+)

This encourages developers to try by every once in a while and check that everything's OK, without really being able to game the system.

[daattali]

I also prefer not to default to "most popular" and I think a random order would be the most fair by default. @mushishi78 as the maintainer of this repo, what do you think?

[gynter]

Hmm we could indeed drop the whole list into a minified json file (date, title, author, thumbnail), then order it via javascript. This would also give the possibility to make loading while scrolling (i.e imgur style, also described in #2 (comment)), make a search box using js, and create fast filters using js (i.e select author from drop down etc).

[daattali]

@gynter yes that's a possibility. It can also be as simple as literally just putting some javascript that on page load looks at all the

tags in the theme list and just reorganizes them randomly. It's a bit more hacky I suppose.

[gynter]

I'd like that more, because since then for people like me, who have javascript disabled by default, can still see the content.

[mushishi78]

@daattali All these guys are maintainers now, I've just been doing a lot over the last few days.

@gynter I would put the data straight into the javascript file, as that's one less file to load and we don't have to add an ajax library to request it.

We could also query GitHub for stats to get a feel for how well maintained the repo is.

We could also add tags to the projects to filter by.

I like the 'freshness' idea as default.

[mushishi78]

I've added alphabetical, latest and shuffle to the main branch, with shuffle as default and no change for javascript turned off. But we can leave this issue open to discuss improvements.

[daattali]

Nice! Thanks!

[jacobtomlinson]

This is cool!

Just a note on the sort by most stars. I think it is important to allow users to do that as I think they will want it. However I agree that it should not be the default.

[mushishi78]

Added sort by stars.