Forem Creators and Builders 🌱

Discussion on: Welcome thread - v1

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benbuilds profile image
Ben • Edited

Hi! I'm Ben. I work on AI platforms and AI-powered experiences. Nice to be a part of this community.

Anyway, I've been thinking of creating a new tech+design community for a particular group of people, and also would like to create a place where community members can post and sell their products/designs to external customers. Essentially a place where freelancers/contractors can sell digital products to customers that are not part of the community themselves.

The gap I see with the Forem Listings module is that it's only available to community members. Not all customers will be community members, so it would need to be accessible outside of Forem.

I see the Dev.to community uses Forem+Shopify for the Dev.to Merch Shop, and while that works for a centrally managed company merch shop, it doesn't really allow for community members to self-post and self-manage their shop listings. Any thoughts on that from this group?

PS I'd be interested in contributing to Forem in a sort of Product Management capacity...let me know if and how :)

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michaeltharrington profile image
Michael Tharrington

Hey Ben 👋

Really great to have you here!

This is a really cool idea for a community and I can totally see how it'd be helpful for you all to have Listings open so that non-community members could purchase items.

However I will note that currently DEV Listings is open to be viewed by anyone (community member or not) and when folks sell items over DEV Listings using the "stuff for sale" category (dev.to/listings/forsale) they aren't actually directly selling the item through Listings so much as they are just advertising it. Most folks selling stuff here are asking to be contacted or linking elsewhere. It's a bit like Craigslist.

All this said, I know we have future plans to improve Listings, I just don't think it's a big priority for us right now. Still, if you have any ideas to improve features on Listings then please do let us know by writing up a feature request under #features.

Also, really cool that your interested in contributing to Forem in a sort of Product Management capacity — we just got 2 new product folks on the team and are onboarding them now. I honestly can't speak to how you might be able to contribute in this capacity. However, I'll point you to our open source repo here so that you might get an idea of things we're working on. Hopefully in the near future we'll be able to offer a product roadmap that makes things clearer.

Really appreciate you sharing your interest in Forem, and don't hesitate to ask away if you have any other questions + feel free to contact us with any feedback.