Feature Requests (open discussion)

[AndersSchmidtHansen]

Hiya Stargazers!

Just a friendly invitation to discuss features for Sidequest that you'd like to see implemented. You can either just add it as a comment here or open a whole new issue labeled with "Feature Request" and I'll look into it as soon as possible.

Everything is welcome, just try to think about what would be helpful to non-technical team members too. Let's keep an open mind and a friendly tone. :)

Features I'm considering:

1. A smoother first experience with Sidequest, like when you download Laravel 5 for the first time.
2. Add a suite of widgets in the Admin Dashboard that are specifically helpful for startups. Like a cash burn rate calculator, a growth rate calculator and so on. We often want to know these things when we discuss how things are going with Pitcherific and I see the importance of these insights at other tech startups too.
3. A more intelligent integration with Google Analytics that takes important KPIs and OKRs into consideration. This is based on Sean Byrnes talk "Effective Analytics for Start Ups" that can be viewed here:
4. Tools for the admin dashboard that are inspired by knowledge from Y Combinator's "Startup Class". More on that here:

Looking forward to the discussion whenever you guys have the time,
@jpcharrier, @codefocus, @michaeljhopkins, @mbonds1219, @corexian, @marcusmoore88, @terrycorley, @ChristianGaertner, @bradbatt, @samhann, @mauran and @JakobP.

Oh and thanks a bunch for your interest in Sidequest, it means a lot to me!

/ Anders

[michaeljhopkins]

In #2 you referenced an interest in spending time making it easier to set up. I found it personally very easy to set up, and had the entire project + all included 3rd party tools up and running in <30 minutes. I can only speak for myself, but I would find more value in more time spent in making the frontend "plug and play". I'm not positive that is the direction you are interested in, but putting in place a bootstrap framework and a little more "body" to the views would be incredibly helpful to me. However, I fully understand if your vision for this project is nearly blank template for the frontend.

EDIT: To give a little perspective I used to maintain a repo with similar (but not identical) intentions for L4 called Forret. In my mind, combining the intentions of Forret's views/themes, base repository set up, directory set up, and 3rd party packages brought in with composer, and Sidequests intentions of SaaS tools (stripe, google analytics, live chat) would be the ideal repo. But again, that is a distinctly different direction I think than Sidequest in it's current state.

[AndersSchmidtHansen]

First off, I'm super glad to hear that setup was pretty quick. That's awesome.

Second, regarding a plug and play front-end: I'm definitely not opposed to it (I'm mostly in the front-end / UX myself), so doing a bit more on that part doesn't conflict with my vision for Sidequest at all.

The thing is, it's all about balance. Since, I've tried loads of frameworks by now and I often waste my time scraping away whatever front-end / .scss / .css stuff the author thought would be nifty. I don't know if it's because many of these frameworks are targeted towards the technical lead alone ("let's make life easy for the back-end guy"), but if there are more people involved (which SaaS often do) then a role like mine would rather get straight to work doing the front-end than cleaning up someone else's front-end first.

Nevertheless, this could be solved by adding some basic stuff and then instead focus on adding some very useful mixins / functions / helper classes that will speed up the front-ender's work. Combined with Twitter Bootstrap then they should be pretty much set for making a working prototype of their concept.

This leads me to the next important thing that you also brought up: vision.

Sidequest is not "just" a framework, per se. It is meant to be much, much more. Not in a grandiose way, ofc, but we're talking a serious SaaS scaffold that respects / reflects a real world where you have more people on your team than technicals. What about the designer? The marketing lead?

In Pitcherific's case, my co-founder Lauge is very much a non-technical person but he still plays a vital role in managing the team, developing the vision and concept etc. His role is also thought into Sidequest.

I'm going a bit off-track, but based on our previous small talks I'm pretty sure that we're talking the same language here. Even more so after going through Forret (seriously, you should be championing a merge between Sidequest and Forret? What you've done already is awesome, so if you want to jump aboard as a collaborator, you're welcome).

I agree about your thoughts on the ideal repo. If it just takes the different roles of typical SaaS startups into consideration and focuses on making a SaaS project a more sane, and dare I say, enjoyable experience; then I'm all for it. :)

Finally, I'd like to dig deeper into this sentence: but putting in place a bootstrap framework and a little more "body" to the views would be incredibly helpful to me.

Tell me more about what specifically could be incredibly helpful and I'll try adding that to Sidequest.

Phew, sorry for the long comment, you just have some interesting and valid points that deserved more discussion.

EDIT: I especially like the API solution from Forret, as I've been thinking about making Sidequest more accessible to ReactJS / AngularJS etc.

[michaeljhopkins]

Merge forret? ha! That would be so much work. I'm fine letting it set as is as an L4 repo. git clone -> "hello world" was very quick. git clone -> first sale has a lot of speed bumps though. And I think it's that path that I'm talking about when I say needs more body. Certainly nothing bespoke, could even stock bootstrap. For example the "admin" side of things is not customer facing, having all the css in place (even if its not the persons first choice for site layout/looks) for sidebars, and top nav bars, and charts makes it a lot quicker for somebody like Lauge to get in and start managing the non code side of things. Over the next week or so I'll play around with some ideas and show you what it is my head

[AndersSchmidtHansen]

;) I just had to bring it up, hehe. It's perfectly fine.

Aight, I'll get to work on adding more body to the consumer-facing end very soon and give you an update when there's something worthwhile.

Looking forward to next week then!

[AndersSchmidtHansen]

@michaeljhopkins just a heads-up: I've added some much nicer login / register / forgot password front-ends now. I'll continue on with payments soon enough, this week has just been quite busy :P

[mario]

Hey guys,

is this still being developed? :)

Cheers,
Mario

[AndersSchmidtHansen]

Hey @mario !

Theoretically yes and practically no. I've had so many things to do at my startup, which has made it impossible for me to do much on Sidequest (for now).

But things are clearing up and I'm definitely planning to continue working on it.

With that said, I'm always open for collaborators and partners, so if you're up for it, let me know. :)

Cheers!

[mario]

As long as I dont have to do frontend ;p

Seriously tho, mail me and lets see if we can figure something out :)

On Sunday, August 30, 2015, Anders Schmidt Hansen notifications@github.com
wrote:

Hey @mario https://github.com/mario !

Theoretically yes and practically no. I've had so many things to do at my
startup, which has made it impossible for me to do much on Sidequest (for
now).

But things are clearing up and I'm definitely planning to continue working
on it.

With that said, I'm always open for collaborators and partners, so if
you're up for it, let me know. :)

Cheers!

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#1 (comment)
.

[AndersSchmidtHansen]

Dude, as long as I don't have to do backend!

I live and breathe the whole UX, design and frontend, so anyone who loves backend and all that heavy lifting; be my guest.

And I think it would be much more healthy for this project to have an actual backender onboard. ;)

I'll mail you, definitely.

You're awesome Mario. :)

[dukenst2006]

Great work Anders Schmidt Hansen ! congratulate you for this initiative, hope you continue with this awesome project. Keep it on !
i will test this version to have an idea about what you already done.
for now I propose some cool features like:
Customer support ticket, Record Activity, customer can Add Deposit (money).
Recuring billing for 1 week / 2 weeks / 1 month / 3 months / 1 year / 2 years (user will have
choice on a drop down)
Admin can add New Product, Service and plan , subscription based on the number of team member.
and so one ....
I am a young developer, I am learning Laravel and I like it , I'm ready to collaborate according to my ability.
Would like to move forward with this great open source project ..
Thanks ::)))

[AndersSchmidtHansen]

Hi @dukenst2006 ! I'm very glad that you like the initiative and I think your feature ideas are great. :)

What you might already have experienced is that because of work I've had to pause working on the project, which means that a bunch of things still needs to be done. You're more than welcome to clone and fork the project though.I just won't be able to add anything to the project for a long time.

I do hope to get the time in future to start working on Sidequest again. :)

[siarheipashkevich]

Hi @AndersSchmidtHansen,

Are you going to support your library?

Thanks,
Siarhei