I know the developer sidebar and use it sometimes although this is something I constantly forget about. Perhaps at it is not so prominent/has to be activated manually, not so self explaining? It helps in some situations when looking up an item, … but as it needs the correct spelling to search it does not help if you got lost in your own naming conventions, like: Did I use Outdoor, or Porch or Terrace, or maybe Patio, or an Abbreviation of one of these words in the name or label? Sorting items, … in a grid with a colum location sorted from A-Z would bring me quite fast to the result. Or I know that the item belongs to a thing that uses a special binding and I sort by binding first and then by location in a second column. And I could see in following columns parameters I want to check out to make a new item identical to existing items, find the cause of an error in deviating parameters, … And, one wish more: Perhaps could even do mass changes without editing every single item in the selection I made.
And for the widgets: The first “problem” is, that from within openHAB, where I work on a new widget there is no functio/link to publish the new widget. The same, when you open the marketplace from within openHAB searching for a widget. So without searching out of openHAB you will not see, that you have the chance to publish a widget to the marketplace and that this is wanted. Instead you feel like “There must be a secret team somewhere that is able to develop and publish widgets to the marketplace and you are not part of it, your contribution may be unwanted”.
If you find the right place, the first impression is: There is a lot of text. Then the mask does not look like a mask for offering a new widget, but to post a text article in a forum (as it is). Furthermore you see that some of the text already in the mask has to be edited and that there are obvioulsy parts you should not change/that are necessary for functionality, but it is not easy to see, what has to be changed an what not. Is the [ and the ] necessary for each position? What about these ## and ###? Should I add my input instead of the text in the brackets, or instead of the red pen or both?
The title field above the text seem to be the field for the name of the widget, but is this correct? Are there naming conventions? Where can/should I make clear that my widget belongs to a certain binding or certain things/items? Then there is this tag field. For what? In the text I see that there should be tags used for maturity, and that I am obviously free to decide, OK. They should go in this tag field? But are other tags needed or recommended, like the binding or type of devices the widget can be used with?
As my widget is dead simple, working for months and will not have any additional features in the future I could call it stable, but below I see a version history starting with 0.1. Is this correct then? Or am I free to decide for a version number?
Then there are several ways mentioned to publish the widget itself. Code-fences with YAML are what for? Yes, I know that I obviously could use them to copy and paste the code from the openHAB editor within these fences, but would everybody understand it that way?
To be honest I made myself here more stupid that I am, but I wanted to point out that for a beginner or someone who does not work with openHAB on a daily basis it is often really hard and timeconsuming to find through the different systems needed as they are often not linked to each other that well and the level on which you find explanations is often quite high/not very detailed.