Hi Chris,
First off thanks for your kind comments!
I also wondered why McNeel doesn’t provide such a service/platform.
Grasshopper has always been the work of a single legend, David Rutten. He is the man, the myth, and the legend behind the platform, the editor, the concept, the addon/plugin architecture, everything.
He did not have much time to work on auxiliary features considering the engine itself needed so much attention. Even now there are major changes every version, such as the .NET 7/.NET Fx swappable backend among other complexities.
When I built the site, it provided the McNeel team an efficient way to offload the hassle of maintaining this doc portal.
Currently, finding addons can be a hassle, with some locally hosted, others on GitHub repositories, or food4rhino.
I see. I thought the package manager solved that issue?
Links…
Yes, as of today there is only a single link from the GH site to mine. Thanks to Scott for that.
Just out of curiosity, have you considered making the site more like a wiki to enable developers to contribute directly, or do you intentionally moderate the addons listed?
I did have a wiki feature where users could contribute a wiki-like content for any addon/component page, but no one used it much, so it was removed.
In line with that, is there a way to automate the documentation process, especially for newly added nodes by plugin developers? This might streamline the process and reduce your manual workload.
I could consider hosting the addon documentation tech on the cloud, right now its a local service, and every addon has some issues being indexed and a lot of manual effort needed to babysit each addon and extract the data properly. If GH only had a way to export the data directly it would save me a lot of hassle.
Another thought - how about linking or integrating the documentation directly to food4rhino or GitHub repositories?
I contacted Food4Rhino, but the McNeel team said it was managed by an external EU party (if memory serves) and they did not have the bandwidth to add a “documentation” button to individual addon pages. Maybe they can restart the discussion, no clue.
What is your long-term vision for the site?
No long term vision is in place at present due to time constraints.
If the community wants to help me redesign/rethink this portal I would not be against the help.
Essentially helping the community DISCOVER components has always been my aim. If anyone has feature ideas to suggest, shoot, I’ll try to get around to it eventually. But time is scarce and the site has seen steadily decreasing usage. No idea why.
Are there any particular goals or milestones you’re aiming for in the next few years?
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Tiled Homepage - Right now the homepage can be a bit of an overwhelming eye-sore for new users. I wanted to just list big category tiles and then have the addons within them on separate pages.
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Global Search - already implemented for components and addons based on the author-provided names.
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Parametric Search - I had thought of a feature that helps users find specific components using a parametric search engine. It would allow you to find components having X number of inputs, or inputs of Y type and outputs of Z type. I never got around to it due to time constraints and low enthusiasm/feedback from community. I really have no idea what the community needs, so no idea which direction to go.
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Tagging - Allow users to tag individual components? But then who will manage the tags to prevent another stackoverflow tag debacle?
Raison d’être…
If I could pick the foundational thought behind the site, it would be, “how do I do X within GH?” and to provide some kind of toolset to help users answer that question. I still don’t think I’m doing a good enough job. I still think the GHDoc site is a kinda big mess for users to wade thru to get anything done.
Origin stories…
I created the site way back when I wanted to use GH myself, and found a wide variety of weirdly named addons (animals? birds? fish?) that had no relation to the features they provided. Many addons had overlapping features. There were no categories anywhere.
So I realized there was a need to list not just the addons but individual components of the addon. So that they could be easily discovered and thus increase addon usage across the platform.
API for Integrators…
I provide a live machine-updated JSON feed for addons and components should anyone need it. I hoped that Food4Rhino could use this to map to their addons, but no progress was made on this front.
Community help…
If someone would like to help me list out more video tutorials for addons, I can explain the process on DM and take it forward. Its a manual process to search youtube for relavent tutorials, and then add them to an excel index so they display in the correct places on the GHDocs site.
Thanks again for your kind words! It helps!
