Things are not reflected in the sitemap or HABPanel. Only Items are. And in both cases, it’s no different to display an Item defined in a .items file or one created through PaperUI.
Ah, you have Simple mode turned on. Go now and turn it off. Remove all the Items it created. And manually define all your Items. Simple mode is worse than useless.
The Item name is the Channel ID with the :
replaced with _
.
For now, I think the majority recommendation is to use PaperUI for Things and .items files for Items. There are features with Items that PaperUI doesn’t yet support.
And I really really don’t like Simple mode. Items are where you model your home automation. This is where you map from some random meaningless string (the Channel ID) to something meaningful (e.g. Livingroom_Lamp).
Files for all Items. PaperUI for all Things. Be consistent. As soon as the replacement for PaperUI comes along, I will migrate my Items out of the .items files as well. As the alternatives to the text configs become feature complete I will move out of my text configs.
Don’t pay any mind to the Items created during Simple mode. Get rid of them and then you can link your Channels to the Items created by Home Builder.
You can keep using PaperUI. Just be aware of it’s limitations and don’t expect too much from it (lots of users want to make PaperUI their only UI.
When that happens, a feature complete replacement for PaperUI will exist. And even then, I believe the consensus is that text based configs will not go away completely, but they will likely change format and they will likely not be loaded automatically upon a change like happens now.
The big thing is if you use .things files:
- you cannot take advantage of auto-discovery
- often the proper format for the .things files are not well documented
- when you manually define a Thing through PaperUI, you are guaranteed to get a syntactically correct thing definition, when using .things files it’s easy to define a Thing incorrectly and the error messages, when there are error messages, are often not helpful
- it takes significantly longer (mostly noticeable on RPis) to load and parse .things files
If PaperUI were feature complete for Items (no way to define tags or metadata right now) I’d recommend using it for Items as well. For now I’d recommend waiting for the replacement for PaperUI.
I recommend never, under any circumstances, recommend using Simple Mode.