Publish auras natively from WeakAuras
emptyrivers opened this issue ยท 5 comments
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
We have a few fields in aura data which don't really do anything, and just exist as meta data for the user to know more information about who made the aura, where it came from, what version it is, etc. We don't really provide access to set any of these values, which leads to some questions sometimes like, "how can i set the url of the aura?". The answer is to export to https://wago.io, and then reimport from wago. But that's not a great answer, in my opinion.
Describe the solution you'd like
Provide an option on exporting an aura to publish it instead (or some variation on that wording). Publishing an aura would pop up some interface that would let you set various pieces of information like description, version, URL, contact info, etc on your local data before preparing an export string.
The exact flow of how to get to the publish interface is not something I've settled on.
Describe alternatives you've considered
- Perhaps we could add another tab to the right hand pane with various kinds of information. But certain people like to complain that we have too many tabs already, so I don't expect this alternative to go down well.
- Provide some kind of debug interface where users who know what they're doing would edit the data directly. This might actually be useful for other reasons too (so long as the option is not easily accessible by people who don't know what they're doing).
@oratory if this does end up getting implemented, consider pulling from the imported data updated meta data to try and prefill version notes.
I think there some overlap with #1512.
And yes we probably should have some way to set/clear the meta data of a aura.
Ah, yes good point. I had forgotten about that ticket. Maybe if i keep writing tickets that dance around the missing pieces I'll eventually figure out the perfect solution.
I think having the meta data visible (and having some explanatory text around the uid on it), would help for #1512, though it might not be enough.
I think we adding a tab is the solution that we should try first.
I believe we should also consider letting the original author "lock" the meta data of the original to a degree. Such as, prohibiting the URL or Name from being edited on publish if they choose, perhaps having an "original Author" field. This could be done in a Custom Option or something, but I'm not sold on that particular solution.
The reason I think this might be important is that there's some users that have tendencies in their aura creation and a certain popularity. For example, there's one user in particular who almost always has hard-coded positioning within their auras. When we see this problems crop up in "Help and Support" it's easy to diagnose as we've noticed that problem multiple times. Knowing who was the original author/url would let us still have that info.
Another reason it just to sort of keep some credit where credit is due. Obviously, this is circumvented if someone wanted to, but the current proposed solution in the initial reading would just overwrite that data, or provide the user an ability to easily do so. Even if they didn't mean any type of maliciousness.