WTH aren't there more usable blueprints available out of the box?

Month of "What the heck?!"
1

In terms of new user experience, a fresh install of Home Assistant only has 2 blueprints available:

  • A motion activated light (that doesn’t check for daytime, etc.)
  • A notification when a device leaves a zone

The Discover more blueprints button takes the user to the latest blueprint exchange topics in the community forum. What shows up there can be a bit random. (At least sorting by top views might help – https://community.home-assistant.io/c/blueprints-exchange/53/l/top?order=views&period=yearly.)

Ideally there would be somewhat of a curated set of blueprints available to chose from.

Edit/Addition: What would be needed is some sort of process to discover what are the most used blueprints and possibly to collect some ratings.

Related:

  • Blueprint versioning – How to know if there is a newer version available?
  • How to move to an updated version of a blueprint without deleting and recreating?
  • How to preview a blueprint?
2

Absolutely agree!

3

The second point is fixed as of 2023.12.

Blueprint authors can now easily link to any version and as a user, all you have to do is click on the link to import and update.

As for tracking updates, if your blueprint author does GitHub releases, you can watch the repository for updates.

Otherwise if the author has a community post, you could request they add a release note to the post. That way, users can bookmark the post and check in the Home Assistant forums for any unread posts that have been followed for latest updates.

That being said, would be nice to have a directory of blueprints and some way for users to follow just version updates on HA forums.