About the QIIME 2 Library

This site is currently an early (but still useful) example of our plans for supporting the continued decentralized development of QIIME 2. Our goal is that this site becomes a one-stop-shop for finding resources and software related to the QIIME 2 ecosystem. The central goal is that this site will be community driven, where developers and authors can share information with their users, and where users can discover tools and resources.

Phase 1 (We are here!)

  • Provide a central collection of available QIIME 2 plugins that can be installed. Plugins can be added by any forum member with a trust level of 1 or more.
Phase 1.1
  • Add interfaces to the site, allowing developers to add their own, and allowing users to discover new ones.
  • Add the "official" QIIME 2 plugins to the Library. These are the plugins that are built and maintained by the @q2d2 / @qiime2 team.

Phase 2

  • Support a revision controlled and automated ingest of plugin and interface information. This will reduce the burden on developers to specifically manage the content on this site and allow further automated tooling to exist. One option for this is for a developer to tell Library where to find it's source, and Library automatically interrogates the project to learn more.
  • Provide a new section of the site for creating automatically tested tutorials. This will require a way to upload (or share) testing/tutorial datasets. Additionally the site will need a task-queue to execute the tutorials.
  • Plugins and interfaces should have well defined installation scripts by this point to support automated tutorial testing.
  • Support search and categorization of content available on the site. Maybe this could be accomplished with tags and customized search panels.
Phase 2.1
  • Improve the various index pages to provide better overviews of available content. Perhaps we could set up something like an "App Store," with "Featured Plugin" or "Featured Tutorial."
  • Migrate existing tutorials from docs.qiime2.org to library.qiime2.org. Ideally users will visit the Library to learn about the latest and greatest techniques and tools available in QIIME 2.

Phase 3

  • Provide more advanced descriptions of plugin information such as automatically documenting actions, types, and formats (effectively replacing the "Available Plugins" section of the User Docs ).
  • By this point, the docs.qiime2.org should have become a relatively brief description of QIIME 2 and how to use it, while all domain specific documentation has been migrated to this site.

Phase "the more distant future"

  • Create customizable automated installers, which install only plugins and interfaces requested. Think of this like a "shopping cart" - you pick and choose the plugins and interfaces you want, the Library makes an installer for you.
  • Provide a mechanism for user to review plugins and provide ratings.
  • Create an automated checklist of "best practices" to additionally rank plugins by, such as "install-ability", test coverage, the presence of documentation, etc.