Schema and other metadata

[orvn]

This application should be SEO and social friendly, allowing admins to control which metadata will appear in seach engines and social sharing.

Additionally, it should use json-ld style microformats for structured data.

[orvn]

SEO

Each project, and the ecosystem directory itself, needs the following for SEO:

• Title
• Meta description
• Language (hreflang)
• Canonical tag
  • Each page will be a canonical of itself for now, mostly just included for best practice here
  • Note: Project singular pages should not be set as canonical of their actual product pages
• Robots tag (allows de-indexing of the application from search engines)

Social

Each project, and the ecosystem directory index itself, needs:

• Open graph
  • Site name
  • Title
  • Description
  • URL
  • Image
• Twitter card
  • Title
  • Description
  • Image
• oEmbed (no need to implement this, everyone uses Open Graph instead now, will just need to test on Discord later, since they were the last major hold-out)

Semantic metadata

Each project should have a Product schema associated with it:

• schema.org/Product
• We would not include the properties the apply only to physical products (dimension, colors, material, etc.)

The Ecosystem itself is a bit trickier to classify:

1. It can be a Product as well
   • schema.org/Product
2. It could just be a simple WebSite (a sub-type of CreativeWork)
   • schema.org/WebSite
3. Honorable mention: The ProductCollection type is really fitting!
   • Unfortunately it's still in the proposal stage
   • It describes a WebSite or tool that is a collection of products
   • schema.org/ProductCollection
4. Honorable mention: Another super interesting option would be ArchiveComponent
   • Unfortunately, this is also in proposal, and won't be widely adopted soon
   • Too bad, since the description basically sounds like a special kind of collection that's meant to exist as a library or archive: "An intangible type to be applied to any archive content, carrying with it a set of properties required to describe archival items and collections."
   • schema.org/ArchiveComponent

[orvn]

The Ecosystem itself is a bit trickier to classify:

1. It can be a Product as well

   • schema.org/Product

2. It could just be a simple WebSite (a sub-type of CreativeWork)

   • schema.org/WebSite

Sadly 3 and 4 are out of the running, but I wanted to mention them here for posterity. Too bad, because they would have been pretty apt.

@jessicaschilling, this raises a question for classification: is this app itself kind of a product? Or just a website?

Whatever we classify it as should also make sense for future forks, because fork-owners might not edit this (it's not the easiest thing to modify, so the type we choose should apply to other use cases).

(With that said, I don't think this piece is necessary for soft-launch, fyi)

[jessicaschilling]

@orvn Thank you for all that detail 😊 I'd go with just a website, honestly.