🚀 Feature: Explore plugin tools categories

[sergeyshevch]

🔖 Feature description

Hello! I'm exited about the new Explore plugin and have a minor feature request. We have multiple tools internally that we want to add to Explore tools. But it will be good to divide it into various categories analytics/development/operations etc. Or event to different tabs on explore page

🎤 Context

For example, we want to use next categories:

• analytics
• operations
• development
• monitoring

✌️ Possible Implementation

category field in tool definition

👀 Have you spent some time to check if this feature request has been raised before?

• I checked and didn't find similar issue

🏢 Have you read the Code of Conduct?

• I have read the Code of Conduct

Are you willing to submit PR?

No, I don't have time to work on this right now

[andrewthauer]

The tool data structure already has a tags attribute which could be used for a similar purpose. The thing that is missing is a way to filter, group, sort, etc by various attributes in the UI.

[sergeyshevch]

For now, I implemented my Own Content component, which supports categories based on tags. But it looks like these fields have different purposes.

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[sergeyshevch]

I guess this is still relevant. Is there anyone also need this feature?

[andrewthauer]

Yes, we currently have 2 tools tabs. One for Backstage tools and another for external tools. We also copied some of the component code as it's not exported in order to do this. I'd prefer to have a single "Tools" page that has some grouping and filtering all fed off the single tools data source. I added the explore-backend months ago with the intention of revisiting the UI to do this, but haven't found the time to do so. I'd still like to, but unsure when or if I'll be able to.

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[andrewthauer]

Still interested

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[efenner-cambia]

I'd still be interested in seeing this

[tudi2d]

Would you be interested in giving this a try & submitting a PR @efenner-cambia ?

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[sergeyshevch]

Not stale

[tudi2d]

Would you be interested in picking this up yourself, @sergeyshevch?

[sergeyshevch]

I'm out of capacity for this issue now. I've implemented some workaround on frontend with custom page and filtering by tags for myself but it's dirty hack and I guess that upstream implementation should be more correct

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[efenner-cambia]

Not stale

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[andrewthauer]

not stale

[Rugvip]

Moving this over to https://github.com/backstage/community-plugins, since that's where the explore plugin now lives

[nickboldt]

@andrewthauer is this related to #237 ? maybe we can combine these into a single plugin?

[andrewthauer]

@andrewthauer is this related to #237 ? maybe we can combine these into a single plugin?

@nickboldt - Yes, imo the existing explore plugin should be extended to allow for more categorization options. Along with the frontend enhanced with filtering, sorting, etc for a larger number of tools.

As an alternative the Backstage catalog could perhaps have a new entity kind to allow for a database of tools that do not fit as a component or resource. Although I'm personally a little less sure about this approach.