Sorry for digging up this old thread. I just learnt about this id tag but I couldn’t find any info about this in the documentation. May I know what is extended automation?
I belive you need an ID tag to be able to edit in the frontend editor (which I think you might not have used at all as the most of us don’t who learned to configure hass withoutr editor ;))
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Thanks. There is always something new to learn everyday.
May be just me but I don’t find any of those editors much help, the ‘old fashioned’ way seems much more user friendly, for beginners the simplest way to get going is to copy an example from elsewhere, work out what’s going on and then adapt it for your own use. The front end ones seem to rely on you knowing exactly what you’re doing to even get started so I don’t see who’d use it.
If you want editing in the front end the Configurator or IDE add ons seem a better choice or am I missing something?
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Personally, I hated doing automations in the yaml files. However, the UI isn’t great either and since it’s missing some functionality I was never really able to use it for my purposes. For editing in the frontend, I’ve found Node-RED to be significantly better than anything else I’ve tried.
I totally agree, the automation editor is bobbins and when it goes wrong and people come here asking for help, it’s really hard to do because the formatting is screwed up. Learning to do it in yaml is not difficult, and copy and paste examples provided by the community are vast in number.
A better idea, I think, would be to abandon the internal editor and provide some ELI5 tutorials for integrating node-red, which people seem to be getting good results with. (or have an opt-in/opt-out node-red integrated option or something).
Edit - as if by magic whilst I was typing that, @tboyce1 proves my point 
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I’m very interested, can someone point me in the right direction to start with Node-RED? I’ve seen some tutorials on Youtube but didn’t think of it as usefull to integrate with hass. What is the advantage of using Node-RED?
I haven’t looked into it properly myself yet, the suggestion was based on anecdotal evidence from other users.
This link is doing the rounds on reddit though…
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I found it great for creating simple device switches for use with Alexa but beyond that found it’s quite deceiving how much you need to understand given the graphical interface you’re presented with. Likewise the ‘tutorials’ out there assume you know a lot of coding so leave out the basics.
I went back to my yaml files that I am comfortable with for my automations but it is really good, and easy, for creating those Alexa devices without the need to restart HA when you mess about with them.
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DIY Futurism is also what I used to get started.
It does take a bit of learning what the different nodes do and also understanding the msg/flow/gobal contexts used to store/pass data around, but the same can be said for Hass’s events and triggers. There’s also documentation for each node when you click it in the UI. I’ve done some fairly complex automations that are a pain to do in yaml and haven’t needed to write any code. There’s certainly things I could have done with a js or python node, but I managed to find other nodes that work without code.