thoughtbot/middleman-template

Turn into a Middleman Project Template

tysongach opened this issue · 2 comments

Netlify is a fantastic tool and suites us well for deploying Middleman app. The Netlify deploy button, though, is a bit confusing.

One big pain point I have is when you click the deploy button the readme, Netlify doesn't allow you to change the name of the repo its about the create. This is a problem for other thoughtbot developers because we obviously already have a repo in the thoughtbot org called middleman-template. I also believe it assumes it should use you personal GitHub account to fork the template, too, and that's often not what we want.

Middleman also offers a feature called Project Templates, which is a way to setup a GitHub repo to house a Middleman template. We can shuffle a few files around and instead utilize Middleman's Project Template feature instead of the Netlify deploy button to kick off a new project using our template. You can still easily deploy the project to Netlify once you're ready, you just won't start with Netlify. I think that's a fine trade-off. You usually don't need a deployed site the minute you create a new project.

Another interesting bit with Middleman Project Templates is that it supports processing through Thor. This means we could present the user with a few options when creating, for example opting in to a pre-setting up a design system.

Resolved via #40