How to build a site like directory.middlemanapp.com

I’m trying to evaluate (as a non-developer, I must admit) good GitHub-friendly repositories. The biggest contenders thus far are probably middleman-directory and jekyll-plugins.

(I wanted to continue this discussion with a “reply as new topic”, but maybe I don’t have the necessary trust-level yet.)

So…

  1. What dependencies/server requirements are there? Is your page served from GitHub?
  2. Is there any kind of database required? From what I glanced over in the source the answer is no, but follow-up question:
  3. If I wanted to keep track of watchers/stars/forks, would I need a database or might you suggest an alternative approach?

And finally just as a curiosity, have you considered trying to use this Discourse forum to set up something similar to ost.io (see example) for each plugin?