[Qgis-psc] QGIS-Hub proposal

[Klas Karlsson]

Hi

My name is Klas Karlsson and I dabble with QGIS in my spare time, and 
once in a while I get an idea...

# Proposal to implement a "QGIS Hub" on the official qgis.org site.

## Background

I was creating a lot of styles just for fun, and was thinking about 
creating a PR to the QGIS GitHub.
However, a lot of the styles were really intricate and might apply to 
relatively few use cases.
In stead of filling up the default styles with nice but really 
"un-expandable" styles, there should be
an easier way.

Sure, there's the resource sharing plugin, and it works great. But it is 
a lot of steps to go through
for someone that is only interested in sharing a simple style or two. 
Enter the idea of a "style hub".

On https://style-hub.github.io I created a demo of how it could look. I 
also created https://layout-hub.github.io
and that made me realize that there may be a few of these simpler 
resource files that the community
would like to share, but don't because of the complexity to do so.

## QGIS Hub

So why not at central "Hub" for all kinds of small and easy to share 
resources?

On https://github.com/style-hub/hub-server/ I started a project to 
create such a hub.
During the development so far I've used local servers to test it, but to 
get some feed-back
I also set up a site on free hosting at http://qgis-hub.rf.gd, which 
isn't great since it for instance lack
TLS/SSL, which is required for some functions, but it should be enough 
to get some user reactions.

The goal is to create the style-hub first, and then use that to "clone" 
it to a layout-hub too.

I'm doing this because it's fun and educational, but if it gets approval 
it would probably look good at:

__hub.qgis.org__

## Requirements

The code is available at GitHub and basically the requirements are:

* PHP web hosting
* MySQL database (users and meta data)
* TLS/SSL for https (required for some functions)
* Storage space for resource files (write access) (1 Gb will probably 
store well over 1'000 resources)

I'm willing to continue to work on the site, but I would prefer not to 
do so alone, since I don't
have the time to drop everything if there's a problem (as mentioned in 
the beginning I'm doing this in my
spare time).
My skills at PHP and MySQL is also limited (this is a learning experience),
so the code would probably benefit from some audit, and if the hub is to 
be included in the official site
I guess it should be styled in the same way, which also would require 
some work.

For now I will continue to work on the site at http://qgis-hub.rf.gd as 
long as I think it is still fun
and I have time available.

Best regards

Klas Karlsson

=========================================================
Mail: klas.karlsson at geosupportsystem.se
Twitter: @klaskarlsson
YouTube: https://youtube.com/klaskarlsson

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