And also, it is not really easy for ‘commoners’ to edit/update the official docs (you need to do it through Github (PR’s), which is not that hard, but i don’t think there are a lot of users even having a github account🤔)
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This is 100% true, the Cookbook should be an ever evolving document. Yes, it needs oversight(probably a lot), but limiting edits has already proved to be an issue. How many guides are outdated?
If they use HACS, they have a github account.
But they might not realize it.
Any nominations for items to be removed from the cookbook?
@Nick4 did you have anything particular in mind in your original comment?
@Sir_Goodenough Do they ?
I thought only when they want to add custom repositories (and not even sure abt that either).
For sure it is not required when using HACS default…it is also not marked as requirement 
My bad… guess I forgot I went through that (many many many years ago :P)
Sorry, I might have given the wrong impression/not explained myself correctly…
I really think the cookbook is a good idea and so far, in my opinion, there is nothing that should be removed.
I have been asking myself what is the ‘best’ entry point for a newcomer in HA: the docs or the forum but maybe it should not be one or the other.
It would be a shame to do twice the effort to create and maintain.
I really wonder what the majority of newcomers are doing: starting from the docs or the forum.
TBH: I think I was more active in the forum from the start then reading the docs but then again, they were not as good as today.
In the end, the most important thing is to make HA as easy as possible to start with (which of is happening all the time), to maximize the experience and avoid having to answer the same questions over and over again.
Of course, this will happen somehow but with the number of installations growing, you don’t want the questions to follow that trend.
yes
We don’t see what are hopefully the successful ones. We see the ‘Will this Pi3 work with a docker or VM’ kind of weird stuff and they have no idea what any of that is, saw in on YT or reddit or random forum posts stuff.
My thought on what the cookbook is about is that they run across a link or one of the posts and that gives them a curated list of things we thing they might run into. There they get advice and links to the actual docs.
I just had a thought. Maybe add a sentence to the cookbook index link to more invite people to see the whole list if they find one of the linked topics. It hangs there like a link, named OK, but I don’t assume that people are knowing what that link to the index will get them.
This would be a good one if someone wants to test this out and get some screenshots of it. Apparently if you are installing, or loading a backup, long running things like that, you can go to the CLI and do this to watch what is happening, I haven’t tried it, but hate it when installing and it tells you nothing. I’ve left mine sit a few hours so I wouldn’t mess up the install or backup recovery because I didn’t know this was possible…
Discord.
Someone that can spool up instances easy would have to write it up, I don’t have the hardware or run a VM
I have seen lots of questions like is it still doing something, how long does this take, when can I open the webpage, it’s broken, etc…
Um… How is this a cookbook post? 
I was thinking either in troubleshooting, like the context in the post, or installation aid so you can watch what the install is doing, know when it is done (If not this process, I have heard there is a process where you can do that), or watching a restore to make sure it is running.
It seemed useful to me, so I brought it up to see if someone wanted to tackle it, if not for the cookbook than just to have available I guess.
This is a jump link to the Zigbee section. I don’t think it shows as intended. The OP was pretty green so wanted a link with the words instead of just the title.
You’re right, the table of contents doesn’t display properly if you click on it. I suppose we’d better restrict ourselves to single line links.
Damn it, I tested all the links in the Cookbook, but I didn’t think of the preview-for-links feature…
I think we can safely take the current TOC out. As I wrote above, I talked to @MissyQ and she’s looking into it in the next weeks. For the time being, we should simply wait, I’m quite sure, the TOC functionality from Discourse will come rather sooner than later. 
It’s an obscure use case, but just letting us know. I’m not going to change the link I dropped on them, it looks fine if they don’t click the link in the link.
I asked TheFes if he could write up in a fresh post his global variable template so I could reference it better and then he asked if it could be in the cookbook. So He did and I did…
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I added a link to Definitive guide to Weather integrations 🌦 under a new subsection callen “integrations”.
The reason why I added it to the top of the section is because I think a section should go from beginner/basic stuff to advanced/obscure. Adding a (core) integration is pretty basic.
I suggest to reorder the section to:
- integration
- frontend
- automation
- blueprint
- templating / yaml
- system (including database)
Notifications can be moved to integration or system maybe?
It’s just my 2 cents. I don’t want to force my opinion.
The main added value of the weather integration guide is to help new users select the integration which fits their needs.
I’m planning to expend it with links to weather cards, supplementery integrations such as air quality and weather related blueprints.
My intent of these very specific guides is to complement this Cookbook.
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