Hi,

time flows and Pharo-Project is improving on all ends since its inception in 2008. As you know over time for the code project hosting we used
SqueakSource, SS3 repos and other and later switched to SmalltalkHub available on http://smalltalkhub.com.
Starting with Iceberg in Pharo 6 many community projects are now hosted elsewhere - most of them moved to GitHub. Pharo's git support allows
also for GitLab, BitBucket and other git hosting services.

I still think easy and quick accessibility to external (re)sources directly from the image is key - especially for new users who often get lost
among all the various things that are available. Back in 2013 I therefore provided a small tool called ConfigBrowser as a replacement for
MetacelloConfigurationBrowser to easily load Metacello configs directly into Pharo.

Later we improved quick loading with a primary tool called "Catalog" written by Esteban. Catalog is indexing every 24 hours all configs within
specific meta-repositories on SmalltalkHub (per Pharo version) like

  http://www.smalltalkhub.com/#!/~Pharo/MetaRepoForPharo80

to automatically build

   http://catalog.pharo.org/

and also a JSON source

   http://catalog.pharo.org/catalog/json

The last one feeds the catalog browser and catalog spotter search within the Pharo image.

So Catalog helped us and especially new Pharo users to find what is available as external project or package. Unfortunately some package maintainers
are too lazy and do not maintain their configs over old and new Pharo versions. Also SmalltalkHub.com is now seen as legacy and will only be available
in a read only mode or as a browseable archive soon.

So we have to think about others steps beyond Catalog and (triggered by a recent discussion on Discord) I started now a simple tool that helped me
finding all GitHub projects marked with "pharo" as GitHub topic. I additionally also added previous catalog loading. More sources could be added
as well as some kind of custom stores/plugins. Maybe this tool could be the base for a future replacement of the catalog tool.

Long story short - let me introduce "Pharo Compendium":

Compendium is a new UI tool to list, browse and load Pharo artefacts from the web like:

 - GitHub Projects
 - Catalog Projects

and other

By default there are two plugin packages available for GitHub and Catalog - but you can implement own ones easily to connect to other sources
on the web. Compendium is available on:

   https://github.com/astares/Pharo-Compendium

It is implemented using the new Spec2 UI framework - so you need a recent Pharo 9 image to give it a try. Just run:

    Metacello new
        repository: 'github://astares/Pharo-Compendium/src';
        baseline: 'Compendium';
        load

to load the tool. Then go to "Tools" -> "Compendium Browser". Attached is a screenshot demoing the primary functionality.

If you want your GitHub project to be listed in the tool you simply need to add the topic "pharo" to the GitHub repository on the GitHub webpage.

Feel free to comment or help improving the tool by sending PR's.

Thx
T. (aka astares)