Community Showcases

Community Showcases were announced in Status Report #5. They are meant to give the creators of interesting community projects the opportunity to present their exciting libraries or tools on the official blog.

Requirements to participate

If you yourself want to participate, there are some broad criteria for libraries to be considered for Community Showcases:

• First and foremost, the tool/library has to be useful and of interest to the community!
• It should have a clear scope and offer good documentation of its features (README, Wiki, Videos, Setup Instructions).
• The project should be proven! It helps if other community members have tried out your project and can attest to its quality.
• The project should generally be compatible with GWT (or there is a good reason why it is not).
• The creator should be a member of our Discord server.

If you are interested in participating and positive that you fulfil these criteria, contact us on Discord. Please be aware, that there may be other community members scheduled to post their Community Showcases before you, so you may need to wait a few weeks before you'll get your chance.

Creating a showcase

Community Showcases are a single post on the blog, giving an overview of the features a library/tool offers (screenshots, demos and videos are very welcome!) and providing examples of how any of us libGDX users can profit from using that very project. For inspiration just take a look at some of the already existing showcases.

If you have been accepted to showcase your project, there are two ways how you can send your post to us:

• Either send the text and any images you'd like to include to the responsible contributor via Discord,
• Or fork this repository, draft your showcase post and create a PR (see the instructions below). This PR will then be reviewed and timely merged by the contributors team.

In both cases, you can familiarise yourself with the markdown syntax and any cool formatting options you might want to utilise (e.g. carousels or feature rows) by looking through the wiki and the already existing showcases in this repository.

Step by step

1. First, you need to fork this repository and clone it to your local machine.
2. Next up, it is a good idea to try to deploy the website on your local machine. This allows you to see any changes you make live. Instructions can be found here.
3. Now you can start creating your showcase. Your showcase is a single post on the official blog. First up, you need to create a file in the _posts directory named according to the YEAR-MONTH-DAY-title.md format. Example: 2021-07-20-skin-composer.md. (Note: If your date is in the future, be sure to launch your local server with the --future parameter!)
4. This new file should look like this:

---
 title: "Community Showcase: [TOOL NAME]"
 excerpt: "[AUTHOR NAME] presents [his/her] [TOOL NAME] library in our Community Showcase!"
 classes: wide2
 header:
   teaser: [IMAGE URL, see note 6 below]

 show_author: true
 author_username: "[USER NAME OF AUTHOR ON GITHUB; is used to link to his/her profile]"
 author_displayname: "[NAME THAT IS ACTUALLY DISPLAYED AS AUTHOR]"

 categories: news
 ---

 <div class="notice--primary">
   <p>
     Hey everybody! As announced last year, we want to give creators of interesting community projects the opportunity to present their exciting libraries or tools on the official blog. In this <b>Community Showcase</b>, [AUTHOR NAME] is going to present [his/her] <a href="[URL TO REPO/WEBSITE]">[TOOL NAME] library</a>!
   </p>
   <p>
     If you are interested in other cool community projects, be sure to check out the <a href="https://github.com/rafaskb/awesome-libgdx#readme">libGDX Awesome List</a> as well. To participate in future showcases, take a look <a href="https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx.github.io/wiki/Community-Showcases">here</a>.
   </p>
 </div>

[From here on, you can start writing your post...]

5. Be sure to replace anything in square brackets!
6. Any images you want to use should be placed in a subfolder of assets/images/posts/. Accordingly, the teaser URL in the frontmatter above (which is the thumbnail used for your post) should look like this: /assets/images/posts/2021-07-20/header.png
7. After the <div> block you can start writing your showcase. If you are interested in ways to format your post or in adding images or videos, be sure to check out the rest of this wiki!