This is something I’ve just started to work on, so it’s quite in its infancy. Forums are a great place to share information, but it can get lost in pages and pages of different threads.
I’m in the process of designing a site where users can share their code to get 3rd party devices up and running on their IDE.
A lot of the SmartThings community are not developers, and I would imagine that a lot of end users probably don’t even use this forum. I’m pretty sure that if my parents had bought SmartThings, they would have seen the devices available from Samsung and been fairly disappointed with the selection - especially when they can even find things like the Nest Thermostat in the SmartThings app.
I’d like to try and solve that problem, with a dedicated website where users can write their own device types or SmartApps and publish them, along with instructions so people can add them easily themselves. I’d throw things in their such as commenting, ranking etc.
I guess the first question is:
Does anything like this already exist before I crack on?
Code is almost always published in github. It has special tools and resources for code writers, and is just the ordinary way to do that. The smartthings IDE already includes the ability to integrate with an author’s individual gitHub.
The moderators just added a new subcategory to the forums here to list community created device types so that authors have a discussion thread for their project, but the code will still be kept in Github. This should make device types much easier to find for others who want to use them.
Beyond that, it sounds like you might be interested in the new wiki project. Many of the most active forum contributors are working on that now. It’s quite new, but should address a number of the issues you mentioned, in particular the difficulty of finding things in the forums. So you might just want to contribute there. The more the merrier!
I always say that forums are for questions, wikis are for answers.
I would not call your project “groovy things.” groovy is a language in and of itself. SmartThings uses a very limited custom variant of it. Groovy programmers would probably be confused by your entries, or send in a lot of corrections which actually wouldn’t apply to the SmartThings environment.
And one last thought, just a personal opinion: One thing that none of the above resources provide but you also mentioned was a review site from the point of view of a SmartThings customer for individual devices.
The wiki will list devices that do work. The forum has a lot of back-and-forth discussion and people coming in and asking “what’s the best smart lock?” A new conversation starting all the time. But there’s no formal independent review site that could simplify voting and limit all the crosstalk. That could be very useful, especially now that SmartThings will be sold in retail stores. So if you do you want your own project, you might consider hosting that.
I myself am terrible at writing reviews, because I always can imagine the 27,000 different use cases which might cause people to have different opinions about something. But I do enjoy reading them, and I find them very informative. So that would be yet another gap that could be filled. FWIW.
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
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Well… You’ll do a better job if you keep track of the activities of your fellow Community members and Search the Forum… (Yah… There’s a lot going on here, I know…).
This Topic is redundant with an existing relatively recent extensive discussion…
But I do enjoy reading them, and I find them very informative. So that would be yet another gap that could be filled. FWIW.
the Forum…