Two problems I see. One is cost. If this is a hosted example, then where will the $100 per month for the hosting come from? If it’s self-hosted, what server will it use and how much does that cost? If self-hosted you are adding lots of maintenance responsibility to whomever will maintain it.
The second issue I see is compatibility with Homeassistant.io. (A woman scorned, etc). It would have to be a symbiotic relationship with Missy’s blessing.
I would much rather see the cookbook as a category in homeassistant.io. It could be clearly identified as “user-supported and not maintained in any way by official Home Assistant.” And best, easier to find. Maybe even in the forum search.
Well, it was just an example to show how easy it is to spin up a Discourse Docker container. It’s basically the same process whether you’re self-hosting, using Discourse’s hosted service or running it on a VPS (same thing, different name).
And honestly, the cost is just pennies in this context. But in the end I really don’t care what solution gets picked, I just wanted to show how easy it is to launch a Discourse site.
The Cookbook Index consists entirely of links to other pages, most here on the forum. You don’t need to host them as well. It could be a single static page - on GitHub, say.
Doesn’t really address the visibility issue, though - a step backwards, if anything. (This would also apply if it were a category in homeassistant.io. Who can find anything there? )
This has been going for nearly two years, but only has a handful of users, in spite of various links. Maybe we overestimate people’s appetite for this sort of thing?
And who exactly is going to run that? The Cookbook is an initiative of the users of the forum. It has no official standing other than being pinned to the top of the Community Guides. homeassistant.io, including all the links, is operated by Home Assistant, and forum users, God knows, have barely any input. How is that going to work?
Whatever you think of the signposting, the fact remains that 32,000 people have found the Cookbook and, one hopes, found it useful. We should be thinking about improving their experience, rather than fretting about things over which we have no control.
Who is going to compile the index and keep it up to date? Forum users can’t access the main site. It takes weeks to submit edits to the docs through GitHub.
The point of this thread was to discuss changes which forum users can make to improve the usefulness of the index. There’s no point in asking for changes we can’t make.
I’m thinking of a dynamic page that pulls the post links from the forum sections. As the indexes change on the forum it would just update on the main site since it’s a mirror of the forum page.
Index? I thought the question that started this was about making the Cookbook more visible to the user. I never knew that there was an index until @jackjourneyman 's post.
That’s an index to the official documentation. Different project, thrown in here to illustrate that a Discourse application is not needed - a single web page would be enough.
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This is not about making it more visible. It’s about making it easier to read.