Request for a Documentation tab

Hello everybody. Andrew and I have been hard at work on building a comprehensive and beautiful documentation website for grasshopper. This was something that was badly needed considering the wide variety of components and plugins and user objects available. We now list more than 40 plugins with nearly 2000 components, and more coming every week!

I hereby request the Grasshopper team to add a Documentation tab which is simply a redirect to our website that is hosted on Github. I've even spoken to the Github team, who graciously provided the rhino.github.io domain for this project.

If you would like quick access to this documentation from the Grasshopper website, then please add your request to this discussion. Thank you!

Special thanks to:

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on May 29, 2016 at 9:09am

I added an 'Online Reference' tab under 'Learn'. It's not particularly discoverable though I don't think. But I worry adding another top-level tab will make it too crowded.

Permalink Reply by Harsh Gupta on May 29, 2016 at 9:58am

Thanks. That's nice. How do we make it more discoverable?

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on May 29, 2016 at 12:34pm

Let's wait and see whether people need to be told to look there a lot. If not, we can assume those who want to find it are able to find it. I also renamed the tabs from expensive sounding words like Discussion, Download and Galleries to simple verbs, so hopefully people who are well familiar with the site will take another look at them soon.

Permalink Reply by Nik Willmore on May 30, 2016 at 2:18am

Verbs better, yes, but the first menu items have the same name as the menu instead of the title of the resulting page those lead to.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on May 30, 2016 at 3:07am

Only on mobile devices, nothing I can do about that, Ning automatically copies the tab name to the top of the list.

Permalink Reply by Harsh Gupta on May 30, 2016 at 2:37am

Can you add a new tab called "DISCOVER" just after Talk?

The tab itself could redirect to -> rhino.github.io

Child items can be:

Component Reference -> rhino.github.io
All Add-ons -> http://www.food4rhino.com/grasshopper-addons/last-updated?ufh

Currently the link under Get > Add-ons is dysfunctional; it simply leads to a blank page.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on May 30, 2016 at 3:10am

How would Discover differ from Learn? There's a few items in Learn already that might qualify better as 'discoverables'.

Permalink Reply by Harsh Gupta on May 30, 2016 at 6:06am

Essentially I just wanted to improve discoverability of the docs site, by giving it its own tab. Or perhaps you could add a screenshot+mention it on the tutorials page, which seems to be like an index of all helpful resources.

Permalink Reply by Armin Seltz on May 30, 2016 at 9:34am

Really love the effort that went into the documentation. Is there a way to extend it? Right now it seems they all just contain the same text that it says right in GH!? Is there ways to add more info or even examples? I really love how MAX/MSP and vvvv have help patches for each component. Is that ever a possibility David?

Regarding the new menu I am not so convinced. Its still confusing and I think verbs are never a good idea to use for everything from a usability standpoint. There is still a lot of overlap of topics. "Talk" is actually the best resources for learning. There is "Add-ons" in "View" (which leads to Groups, but should really lead to food4rhino.com) and "Add-ons" in "Get" which leads to an empty page. "My Page" shouldnt be in the top menu, but in the box on the right, where links to the inbox etc are. "Home" shouldnt have any subitems, because that is kind of vague and I think the member index is not necessary, "listings" and "ideas" are an empty page and not sure what they would do if they worked. I am aware that there is a lot of content and the website has surely grown and morphed a lot, but I really think from a usability and aesthetic stand-point the website is ripe for a complete overhaul. Maybe something that can go alongside the launch of GH2 (fingers crossed).

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on May 30, 2016 at 9:58am

I really love how MAX/MSP and vvvv have help patches for each component. Is that ever a possibility David?

Yup that's the plan for GH2 documentation. No more compiled help content but an extendible, translatable wiki-like system including glossary, separate topics, example files.

Permalink Reply by Armin Seltz on May 30, 2016 at 10:31am

Sweeeet. So when can we expect GH2? Still this year?

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on May 30, 2016 at 12:18pm

It bloody well better be, it's taking much too long already...