🌟 Featured notebooks & new main menu

[fonsp]

I have been working on a new main menu for Pluto, with a focus on a new featured notebook system! Here is a screenshot:

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Featured Notebooks

Right now we have a very small set of sample notebooks, and they are not updated frequently. We should change this! My idea is: let's make Pluto an awesome platform for the Pluto and Julia community to share their work, to make it more attractive for people to contribute.

The major changes compared to our old sample system are:

• Features are listed directly in the main menu. Everyone who uses Pluto will see it!

• (TODO) An exact copy of the "Featured" UI will also be available on plutojl.org, with execution powered by binder, and PlutoSliderServer coming soonish

• You can read Features directly without running them (we load a precomputed statefile from our servers)

• Features are developed and generated on a separate repository: https://github.com/JuliaPluto/featured. This repository is added as a "source" to a local file: featured_sources.json. In the future, you could add more sources here, like a source specific to astrophysics notebooks, or Fons's Big Mess of JavaScript Notebooks.json.

• Notebooks can now have a:

  • Preview image
  • Title & description
  • Author name & image

• We can group notebooks together in collections about a single topic

• We can give special labels to notebooks, "New!":

Image from https://cataas.com/

Offline mode

When unable to load the notebook collection from the web, we show our classic set of notebooks:

These don't have a statefile, and clicking them will load them in the old way. This means that we need to leave all of the old sample-related code, and the old sample notebooks. Sad, but on the bright side, removing the sample notebooks would probably mean that our project gets classified by GitHub as "JavaScript" instead of "Julia" 🙃

TODO

• index.json listing notebooks and metadata JuliaPluto/PlutoSliderServer.jl#68 with tests
• Create https://github.com/JuliaPluto/featured
• 💌 Pluto.frontmatter #2008
• Frontmatter in PlutoSliderServer
• GitHub Action on https://github.com/JuliaPluto/featured to generate with a new Pluto rev as input
• Local sample sources system
• SHA Integrity on fetching sources
• SHA Integrity on fetching notebook files - launch_params: allow specific integrity for notebookfile and statefile urls #2052
• New main menu: recent notebooks
• New main menu: open notebook
• New main menu: featured notebooks
• Featured: collections
• Featured: cards with frontmatter info
• Offline fallback
• Remove old samples?
• Nicer filename when running a sample - POST /notebookupload: allow specifying a filename #2051
• Take screenshots for the notebooks on https://github.com/JuliaPluto/featured
• Generalize binder to other backends #2029
• New run-local backend
• Show bonds "greyed out" when not connected #2047
• Show back button in preview
• Maybe the URL for viewing a sample could look nicer? whatevs
• featured_sources.json in bundle? maybe just put it in source? wait 3 years?
• where is the Pluto logo
• Bring back the loading bar
• Update featured notebook to use Frontmatter GUI #2104
• When forking a featured notebook, maybe the frontmatter should be cleared? At least the author and license...
• Document update & release process https://github.com/JuliaPluto/pluto-developer-instructions/blob/main/How%20to%20update%20the%20featured%20notebooks.md
• Document update process in Pluto release process. Auto tests would be great.

[github-actions]

Try this Pull Request!

Open Julia and type:

julia> import Pkg
julia> Pkg.activate(temp=true)
julia> Pkg.add(url="https://github.com/fonsp/Pluto.jl", rev="featured-notebooks")
julia> using Pluto

[fonsp]

Maintainer instructions are here: https://github.com/JuliaPluto/pluto-developer-instructions/blob/main/How%20to%20update%20the%20featured%20notebooks.md

[fonsp]

Merging! Happy summer everyone 🌟