Allow Developers to Start Small

[mmjp-rusty]

As I delve into this, I'm discovering a philosophy or architecture problem. The API doesn't allow for "prototyping".

My primary pain point with this approach to collections, is that you have to have everything done before you create a collection.

Here are the things you need to know before you can even create your collection:

How and where are you going to host the images. Hosting has to be decided and already setup.
What are all the images, exactly, right now. All images need to be defined in advance. (Hidden settings helps this a bit but it's not enough )
What is all the metadata.
What is your presale going to look like.
Exactly how many NFTs are you going to have at the upper bound.
What is your go live date.
What is a gatekeeper and do you need it and are you going to use it.
...etc

You also need pretty intimate understandings of what accounts are with relation to storing state on chain. You need to have a good understanding of authorities and how the blockchain manages "fungibility" with their native token. You need to understand how your collection is defined and what it means to verify the collection..etc

And yes a lot of of that is mutable but you still have to have an initial value for it all or at least understand the ask enough to supply a default that will get your prototype up and running.

It's very easy, for someone who already understands the entire system. It's a very steep learning curve for a new arrival.

There isn't a "Sensible Defaults", low barrier to entry, "I'm still I the prototyping and figuring things out phase" route, to defining your collection.

We need a very simple pair of instructions to be made available from Metaplex that use sensible defaults and allow the collection to be defined iteratively.

createCollection(collectionName: string, symbol :string) : PublicKey /* candy machine address */

mintFromCollection( collectionName :string, qty :number)

Those should be the only two methods required for a new team/developer to get up and running with metaplex. And ideally there is a tutorial for how to issue those calls using vanilla web3.

Then the developer can add on options like

setMetadataUriTemplateForCollection(uriTemplate: string)

setFeeBasisPoints()

..etc All things the developer can dig into once they've gotten up and running with their collection gallery and minting flows.