This may be because the Cookbook is the best hidden feature of the forums.
2 Likes
I’m not going to lie, so that comes out.
I realize it’s not constructive, but it’s still an opinion.
I really only had one constructive opinion that was posted elsewhere, I can copy that one here as well if you didn’t see it there.
My constructive comment in response to someone saying it is longer and that might be an issue is that the ()[] notation could be used instead of 2-lining things to better describe the link. That could condense some of the lines.
As someone that does like the current, but is open to changes, I’m afraid my influence is not terribly constructive, and therefore the ‘cringe’ comment pointing at it changing from the nice OCD list groups to longer, and (to me) more confusing with colors and highlights and icons all the busy nature of things. I don’t know what any of it means. Intuitively it is visual noise to me, even though I read the comments on the intention of some of it. Not everyone has the visual confusion issues I do, so maybe it’s all better this way. I’m one that gets dizzy in a movie theatre and shuts off the gifs if they move in a certain way, so the additions are not helpful to someone like me.
However I can adapt… It’s not about me. I can just snag a copy of the current from the edits and paste it somewhere for me to use to pull the linkf off of. And I do use this post every day in that manner to help others, Then I have a path that keeps my brain calm and the users will have the real version with all the things to help them in the manner you all see the world better.
(maybe we can add a post to the thread that is like this, and I will be happy to keep it up to date as a wiki for those with visual issues like me? up for discussion)
If you use MediaWiki, I would be happy to contribute.
Regarding my previous comment- just how is the new user supposed to find the cookbook?
Good question. It’s pinned to the top of Community Guides, but that’s about it. What do you suggest?
Finding anything has always been tricky… 
1 Like
It’s linked in the discord new user stuff.
Missy is traveling this week so getting suggestions on her list will be tough if you have suggestions for other places.
That’s what the example does - the extra lines are there on purpose where the title of the link isn’t clear.
Well it’s discourse and their version of markdown, so we are stuck with that.
Here making it a WIKI means that anyone that is beyond new user can edit it.
You expect new users to go into that mosh pit?
How about in: How to help us help you - for those new users go straight to the forums.
How about on this page: Getting started - Home Assistant
Somewhere on this page: Help - Home Assistant
This would be a good place: Documentation - Home Assistant
Finding Community Guides on the forum isn’t very obvious. It reminds me of “It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.’”
Bonus points if you get the snark.
Just pointing it out as another place… Don’t shoot the messenger.
I’ve been asking for that for a while. That’s not a WIKI so I can’t change that one but someone with powers could
The rest all have forum links but not cookbook links. Not excusing, just pointing it out. When @Missy get’s back I’ll ask her to review this thread.
2 Likes
I understand that.
Change what shows here instead of the title & put in something that works was the alternate answer to someone else’s comment in another thread. There are several of these done already in the cookbook.
Offering alternatives is all.
I like the invite to here note in the cookbook, very good idea Jack!
1 Like
OK… The next post is an alternative version with collapsible sections. Horizontal rules and shaded background removed.
You can have collapsible sections within sections, but I can’t find a way to indent them, so I’m not sure how readable it is.
Wiki again, if you want to experiment.
Edit: Discord seems to indent them for you.
Another edit: CTRL + F should still work, even if the sections are collapsed. The icons (which are a bit loud) are provided by Discord. In Markdown they’re much less in-your-face.
1 Like
Option two: Collapsible sections with large headings
A collection of posts on how to perform common tasks and deal with common problems.
This guide is intended for those new to Home Assistant, those that are struggling to find answers on a particular subject, and those in troubleshooting mode.
Most links are to posts in Community Guides
indicates a link to Home Assistant documentation
indicates a link to an external website
CTRL + F to search
Getting Started With The Forum
Click to expand
Discourse New User Guide
This forum uses Discourse software
Hands-on practical courses to learn Discourse commands
Two courses taught by the Discourse discobot
How to help us help you
How to ask a good question
How to help us help them
How to give a good answer
Tips on community searching
Looking for answers and duplicate topics in the forum
Custom search links for frequent searchers
Shortcuts to save repeatedly typing the same thing into the search toolbar
Formatting YAML in forum posts
Using the preformatted text tool
Adding links to forum posts
Preview blocks and linking to particular posts
Getting help in languages other than English
This is an English language forum, but there are others
How to share automations and scripts
Making it easy for others to read and copy them
Getting Started With HA
Click to expand
Awesome Home Assistant
An overview
Introduction to Home Assistant and the official documentation
A personal view
Twenty things I wish I knew when I started with Home Assistant
And another one…
Basic common Home Assistant tasks
Tips on searching the docs
Using the search box
Integrations, add-ons and custom integrations
How they differ, what they do
Disaster recovery planning
What could possibly go wrong?
Installation
Click to expand
Beginner
Advanced
Click to expand
Installing Home Assistant OS using Proxmox 8
Installing HAOS in a VM on TrueNAS SCALE
Installing Home Assistant on VMWare Player / Workstation 16 (or 17)
Database
Configuration
Click to expand
Automations
Click to expand
How and why to avoid device IDs in automations and scripts
Using entity IDs and states
Automations #1: The trigger
Triggers only fire when they change from false to true
Automations #2: The condition block
The function of the condition block is to stop the automation
Turning lights on and off at sunrise and sunset
Example of a motion activated lights automation
Automations - from zero to hero
A step by step guide
Annotating automations and scripts
Extra keys not allowed @ data[‘xxxx’]
What does it mean?
Backups
Click to expand
Frontend
Click to expand
Themes
Defining the look of your dashboards
This entity does not have a unique ID
What it means, and how to fix it
Easy date and time card
Using only markdown
Read-only sensor display
Without templates
Integrations
Click to expand
Weather integrations
The definitive guide
Notifications
Click to expand
How to make notifications more informative
Adding device names and timestamps
Templating
Click to expand
What the heck is a template?
And how can I use it?
How to read a template in yaml
The why and how of all those delimiters
What’s with all the curly brackets?
Template Delimiters and Whitespace Control.
Getting time and date with templates
A trigger based template sensor to store global variables
A trigger based template sensor to retrieve last change of an entity
YAML Anchors
Re-use code and shorten your templates
Sample templates basic to exotic
From one of the HA Devs
Useful Conditions
Are all entities inside a domain equal to a state?
Apples, Oranges and Bananas
How to insert “and” between the last two items in a list
Replacement for UK Met Office integration
The API for the existing integration closes down this year
YAML
Hardware
Click to expand
Energy Monitoring
Click to expand
Basic energy monitoring
Understanding energy and power
Utility meter tariffs
How to use them to conditionally measure things
Availability templates
Their importance for energy template sensors
Monitoring energy by device category
And calculating running averages
Voice Assistants
Click to expand
Overview
Voice in Home Assistant
How to launch an Alexa skill from Home Assistant
Talking about the Weather
Fixing typical pronunciation problems
Friday’s Party
Creating a private, agentic AI using voice assistant tools
Technologies
Click to expand
AI
Click to expand
Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code
Friday’s Party
Creating a private, agentic AI using voice assistant tools
Bluetooth
Click to expand
About Bluetooth…
Understanding Home Assistant’s capabilities
List of compatible Bluetooth adapters
Getting the IRK for your phone
Tracking Android and Apple devices
Flashing a Bluetooth proxy
Extend your Bluetooth range
Enhancing device tracking with the Bayesian integration
Which room are you probably in?
ESPHome
Click to expand
SSH
Click to expand
Tasmota
Click to expand
Zigbee
Click to expand
Is Zigbee right for you?
What Zigbee is good at and what it does less well
Zigbee buyer’s guide
Do your research!
Migrating from a Philips Hue bridge to ZHA
A step by step guide
Where can I find a list of supported devices?
Zigbee network optimization
A how-to guide for avoiding radio frequency interference + adding Zigbee Router devices (repeaters/extenders) to get a stable Zigbee network mesh with best possible range and coverage by fully utilizing Zigbee mesh networking
Quirks
How to set up custom device handlers in ZHA
Mains-powered devices that are not routers
Not many people know that
Facts about Zigbee
A to Zig
A Zigbee glossary
Database of Zigbee devices supported by ZHA, Z2M and others
Zigbee2MQTT (Z2M) supported devices
How to handle ZHA devices stuck in “Interview Complete. Configuring”
Z-Wave
Troubleshooting
Click to expand
Troubleshooting your configuration
Troubleshooting the companion app
How To Share a Debug Trace
Essential when asking for help with automations or scripts
How to Troubleshoot your Rasberrry PI Crashing
How to Get to Your Log After Restart / Restore
Retrieving your log from the system journal
Target selector & entity selector errors
What does “Message malformed” mean?
Yaml: How to read configuration errors
Tracking Down Instability Issues Caused by Integrations
How to set DNS after first install
When Home Assistant can not obtain an IPv4 address
For More Experienced Users
Click to expand
Automations: trigger_variables
Automations: how to disable a trigger on the fly
Yaml: How to read configuration errors
Template select entities
Template selects create an entity that acts like an input select helper in the front end
Blueprints - get your !input value into a template
How to set a custom scan Interval
How to add custom buttons to the side toolbar
Read-only sensor helper display without templates
How to use context
Telling whether it was an automation, a physical device or a dashboard that changed an entity
Contributing to the Project
Contributors
New posts in this series (or improvements to existing ones - each post is a wiki) are welcome.
For this series we are limiting topics to items directly related to Home Assistant Core & Frontend, and not individual Custom Integrations, Custom Themes, Dashboard Items, Add-ons or Blueprints. Consider starting other lists for those.
Join the cookbook discussion if you have any questions or want to contribute in other ways.
- Make a post in Community Guides and tag it with
cookbook. - Include a link to this index
- Add a link from this index
Be aware that posts can be edited by anyone.
4 Likes
I’ve submitted an edit for the Getting Started page in the docs.
Not sure where to put it in the Help page. All the items under “Videos, talks, etc.” are at least seven years old…
The Documentation page doesn’t really have an area for links to forum posts.
What if we used the titles in the collapsible boxes’ summaries, like so? (I saw I could edit the post, but thought it would create confusion with replies and more edits.)
Example:
Getting Started With The Forum
Discourse New User Guide
This forum uses Discourse software
Hands-on practical courses to learn Discourse commands
Two courses taught by the Discourse discobot
How to help us help you
How to ask a good question
How to help us help them
How to give a good answer
Tips on community searching
Looking for answers and duplicate topics in the forum
Custom search links for frequent searchers
Shortcuts to save repeatedly typing the same thing into the search toolbar
Formatting YAML in forum posts
Using the preformatted text tool
Adding links to forum posts
Preview blocks and linking to particular posts
Getting help in languages other than English
This is an English language forum, but there are others
How to share automations and scripts
Making it easy for others to read and copy them
Getting Started With HA
Awesome Home Assistant
An overview
Introduction to Home Assistant and the official documentation
A personal view
Twenty things I wish I knew when I started with Home Assistant
And another one…
Basic common Home Assistant tasks
Tips on searching the docs
Using the search box
Index to Home Assistant documentation
Unofficial A-Z index
Integrations, add-ons and custom integrations
How they differ, what they do
Disaster recovery planning
What could possibly go wrong?
The downside is that one loses the heading formatting.
1 Like
Despite the click needed to expand, I think navigation is much quicker because you need to scroll less. The click to expand label might be a bit more beginner friendly. The title in the heading might be more compact than needed here, and I kind of miss the formatting when the section is expanded.
1 Like
Good points.
I’m not hating that.
It’s not tripping my Brains Sensory overload circuit breaker.
2 Likes
So is this next post a third option, then?
Option three: Collapsible sections with small headings.
A collection of posts on how to perform common tasks and deal with common problems.
This guide is intended for those new to Home Assistant, those that are struggling to find answers on a particular subject, and those in troubleshooting mode.
Most links are to posts in Community Guides
CTRL + F to search
Getting Started With The Forum
Discourse New User Guide
This forum uses Discourse software
Hands-on practical courses to learn Discourse commands
Two courses taught by the Discourse discobot
How to help us help you
How to ask a good question
How to help us help them
How to give a good answer
Tips on community searching
Looking for answers and duplicate topics in the forum
Custom search links for frequent searchers
Shortcuts to save repeatedly typing the same thing into the search toolbar
Formatting YAML in forum posts
Using the preformatted text tool
Adding links to forum posts
Preview blocks and linking to particular posts
Getting help in languages other than English
This is an English language forum, but there are others
How to share automations and scripts
Making it easy for others to read and copy them
Getting Started With HA
Awesome Home Assistant
An overview
Introduction to Home Assistant and the official documentation
A personal view
Twenty things I wish I knew when I started with Home Assistant
And another one…
Basic common Home Assistant tasks
Tips on searching the docs
Using the search box
Integrations, add-ons and custom integrations
How they differ, what they do
Disaster recovery planning
What could possibly go wrong?
Installation
Configuration
Automations
How and why to avoid device IDs in automations and scripts
Using entity IDs and states
Automations #1: The trigger
Triggers only fire when they change from false to true
Automations #2: The condition block
The function of the condition block is to stop the automation
Turning lights on and off at sunrise and sunset
Example of a motion activated lights automation
Automations - from zero to hero
A step by step guide
Annotating automations and scripts
Extra keys not allowed @ data[‘xxxx’]
What does it mean?
Frontend
Themes
Defining the look of your dashboards
This entity does not have a unique ID
What it means, and how to fix it
Easy date and time card
Using only markdown
Read-only sensor display
Without templates
Integrations
Weather integrations
The definitive guide
Notifications
How to make notifications more informative
Adding device names and timestamps
Templating
What the heck is a template?
And how can I use it?
How to read a template in yaml
The why and how of all those delimiters
What’s with all the curly brackets?
Template Delimiters and Whitespace Control.
Getting time and date with templates
A trigger based template sensor to store global variables
A trigger based template sensor to retrieve last change of an entity
YAML Anchors
Re-use code and shorten your templates
Sample templates basic to exotic
From one of the HA Devs
Useful Conditions
Are all entities inside a domain equal to a state?
Apples, Oranges and Bananas
How to insert “and” between the last two items in a list
Replacement for UK Met Office integration
The API for the existing integration closes down this year
Energy Monitoring
Basic energy monitoring
Understanding energy and power
Utility meter tariffs
How to use them to conditionally measure things
Availability templates
Their importance for energy template sensors
Monitoring energy by device category
And calculating running averages
Voice Assistants
Overview
Voice in Home Assistant
How to launch an Alexa skill from Home Assistant
Talking about the Weather
Fixing typical pronunciation problems
Friday’s Party
Creating a private, agentic AI using voice assistant tools
Technologies
AI
Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code
Friday’s Party
Creating a private, agentic AI using voice assistant tools
Bluetooth
About Bluetooth…
Understanding Home Assistant’s capabilities
List of compatible Bluetooth adapters
Getting the IRK for your phone
Tracking Android and Apple devices
Flashing a Bluetooth proxy
Extend your Bluetooth range
Enhancing device tracking with the Bayesian integration
Which room are you probably in?
ESPHome
Tasmota
Zigbee
Is Zigbee right for you?
What Zigbee is good at and what it does less well
Zigbee buyer’s guide
Do your research!
Migrating from a Philips Hue bridge to ZHA
A step by step guide
Where can I find a list of supported devices?
Zigbee network optimization
A how-to guide for avoiding radio frequency interference + adding Zigbee Router devices (repeaters/extenders) to get a stable Zigbee network mesh with best possible range and coverage by fully utilizing Zigbee mesh networking
Quirks
How to set up custom device handlers in ZHA
Mains-powered devices that are not routers
Not many people know that
Facts about Zigbee
A to Zig
A Zigbee glossary
Database of Zigbee devices supported by ZHA, Z2M and others
Zigbee2MQTT (Z2M) supported devices
How to handle ZHA devices stuck in “Interview Complete. Configuring”
Troubleshooting
Troubleshooting your configuration
Troubleshooting the companion app
How To Share a Debug Trace
Essential when asking for help with automations or scripts
How to Troubleshoot your Rasberrry PI Crashing
How to Get to Your Log After Restart / Restore
Retrieving your log from the system journal
Target selector & entity selector errors
What does “Message malformed” mean?
Yaml: How to read configuration errors
Tracking Down Instability Issues Caused by Integrations
How to set DNS after first install
When Home Assistant can not obtain an IPv4 address
For More Experienced Users
Automations: trigger_variables
Automations: how to disable a trigger on the fly
Yaml: How to read configuration errors
Template select entities
Template selects create an entity that acts like an input select helper in the front end
Blueprints - get your !input value into a template
How to set a custom scan Interval
How to add custom buttons to the side toolbar
Read-only sensor helper display without templates
How to use context
Telling whether it was an automation, a physical device or a dashboard that changed an entity
Contributing to the Project
Editing the official documentation and creating a pull request on GitHub
Contributors
New posts in this series (or improvements to existing ones - each post is a wiki) are welcome.
For this series we are limiting topics to items directly related to Home Assistant Core & Frontend, and not individual Custom Integrations, Custom Themes, Dashboard Items, Add-ons or Blueprints. Consider starting other lists for those.
Join the cookbook discussion if you have any questions or want to contribute in other ways.
- Make a post in Community Guides and tag it with
cookbook. - Include a link to this index
- Add a link from this index
Be aware that posts can be edited by anyone.
3 Likes
If voting I like the prior one better. Option two better.
Home Assistant Cookbook - Discussion Thread - #313 by jackjourneyman.