Is Posit Publisher a recommended replacement for RPubs for beginning students?

[davidkane9]

For beginning students (and when using RStudio), I have them use RPubs to quickly get nice looking graphics on the web, for free and via handy RStudio buttons. It works well! But I am moving to Positron . . .

And I just noticed that there is a new button for "Deploy with Posit Publisher". Perhaps this is the future of easy-and-free-for-students publish-to-the-web tools for beginning students? If so, please confirm!

[nealrichardson]

Thanks for the question. Posit Publisher is a VS Code/Positron extension for publishing to Posit Connect. It's not a publishing service itself.

The free service of the future is https://connect.posit.cloud/. Currently it supports pulling code from GitHub, not pushing from Positron, but that is on the roadmap.

[davidkane9]

Thanks! Is there a date at which this will come out of beta? I expect to be teaching a few hundred students starting in June, and I always hesitate to use something still in beta, although I am breaking this rule to use Positron, since it is so clearly the future.

[alex-chisholm]

Hi David,

Connect Cloud remains in Beta for a few reasons, including only supporting GitHub as a deployment path and not yet having organization plans for collaboration. Although we haven’t set a date/milestone to remove this label, I appreciate the comment for us to consider the implications.

That said, Connect Cloud does maintain a dedicated team of engineers to ensure the that service is stable for its free and paid users.

Happy to talk more about how the new platform might help your students.

[davidkane9]

Thanks for the info! Feel free to close this discussion, if you like. No need to talk with me, although I appreciate the offer!

Having looked at this more closely, I have no more concerns. My plan is to not use RPubs or anything similar. Instead, I will wait till week 2, when students learn Git/GitHub, before teaching them to put stuff on the web. At that point, we will use quarto publish gh-pages, which actually works much better for beginning students than the Quarto documentation would lead one to expect!