Hello,
While Home-Assistant already has many different documentation avenues, I’m thinking it might help to avoid repeat questions in the live chat and forums if there was a menu tab dedicated specifically to tutorials whether they be submitted by users or just pulled from specific blog posts.
For example, I’ve been thinking about different ways to use Tasker with Home Assistant for the past two weeks or so. When I searched the forums and components docs, I didn’t see anything about Tasker so I was about to post a thread about it. It was only after reading a third party article that I first learned about home-assistant.io/blog/2015/12/ … -switches/.
The point is, it would save the more active devs from having to answer a lot of repetitive questions if there was an easily accessible resource for automations, integrations etc… which may not qualify as “components” per the official documentation. Considering the infinite ways in which Home Assistant can be used, there’s likely going to be a lot more content forthcoming as more users adopt it anyways. We might as well make it easy to find this content early on before it gets way too unwieldy… Just my two cents…
We are using a how-to tag for tutorial blog post. There is also the Cook book which is serving as a place for user made content. At the moment there are only a few real tutorials available and I think that we don’t need an additional entry for those for now. If there were 20+ tutorials we should definitely consider to reorganize the content.
At couple of component/platform docs already contains examples which could help users to get started.
Both (Cook book and Blog) is open for everybody who want to contribute.
Based on what you’re saying then it appears that such a feature already exists in theory… The problem is in practice such content is buried in the UI. I’ve used the “configuration cookbook” on a number of occasions for example, but it was only after you just pointed it out that I realized it was open to contributions via a github repo… Then, it was only after checking out other Home-Assistant projects on Github that I knew about things like a javascript implementation in the works?
Also, at risk of stating the obvious, I might point out that more tutorial content may be available if people had any idea of how/where to share outside of the user forum or mailing list…
The Adafruit website is a great model for things like this. While the “Adafruit Learning System” is hosted as an independent entity, there are multiple points of entry which users might find to bring them there including a simple “Learn” button on each realted product page.
As far as features which may be in development like the javascript implementation, or the Tasker utilities, perhaps a good way to get the word out would be through dedicated pinned threads on the Development forum?