add mechanism for selected projects

[denten]

On the project page, each research cluster has a number of projects underneath. Some of these are pretty old. We need

1. a mechanism to highlight a few active projects
2. right now clicking on the cluster name shows a list of all projects, but that navigation is pretty hidden. Add view all >> link next to the name as well.

Would it be possible to highlight the projects based on the most recently edited time stamp in the _posts folder?

[nyutka]

@denten I have found a plugin for getting the modify date, https://github.com/gjtorikian/jekyll-last-modified-at, but it will break the ability to build on GitHub servers. On the other hand it won't work on travis, cause git is not preserving file modification dates.

We have two options:

1. add a tag / key in front matter, where you can mark project as active. Con is you'll need to manually remove active status from older projects.
2. have a yaml file in _data with a list of active projects. In this case we need a way to uniquely identify every project. For example with category and title, smth like knowledge-design-studio/Wax. Or just with file name 2018-01-31-wax.md

What will you prefer?

[JonathanReeve]

You can use whatever Jekyll plugins you like if you build on Netlify instead of GitHub. And it still automatically builds on GitHub commits. Just make sure all the dependencies are well-defined in the Gemfile.

Instead of tracking project activity with post modification dates (which really tracks the recentness of the post, not necessarily the project), why not use something else, like the number of GitHub commits for the project in the past year? The badges I set up for this can also be curled from the command-line, or from Ruby, at build-time, i.e. curl https://img.shields.io/github/commit-activity/y/eslint/eslint.svg | cut -d ..., which you could then add to a project's metadata every time the site builds. That metadata could then be used to sort the projects with liquid.

Of course, not all projects have associated GitHub repos, but you could also look at the dates from the project filenames, and archive those that are more than about 1 or 2 years old.

[nyutka]

@JonathanReeve I think preserving Github build compatibility is something which @denten mentioned before.

Otherwise, I have found a jekyll plugin https://github.com/18F/jekyll-get for requesting JSON data (sure, it's probably also possible to do what you described by creating a custom plugin, but I am not a Ruby developer). So if you can provide an endpoint which returns JSON data with a list of active projects - I can use that.

Of course, not all projects have associated GitHub repos, but you could also look at the dates from the project filenames, and archive those that are more than about 1 or 2 years old.

maybe I was not clear enough, I was not going to take the date from filename, but rather create a _data/active.yaml file with a list of active projects, using file names, like this:

- 2014-09-01-open-syllabus-project.md
- 2014-10-21-minimal-citizen.md
- 2014-10-31-medieval-mapping.md

and you can manually update the list of active projects, when needed

[denten]

@nyutka can we select ~5 or so projects at random on build? i'd prefer not to have an extra admin file as we are unlikely to update it in a timely fashion