I saw several people saying that developer docs are great, however, other than the example plugin and related guides, the API reference is quite sparse in explanations. To give you an example, the app.vault.modify method doesn’t say a thing about what it does. Yes, it takes a file, a string data, and a third optional argument, but, for what? What does it do?
In that sense, the github API definition is much more complete, so I don’t understand what is the role of the official API reference:
The documentation website definitely needs improvement. I’m working on developing my first plugin and found that the website didn’t have a whole lot of seemingly necessary info. I’ve just assumed that the people developing advanced plugins for Obsidian were wizards or something. As an example, I submitted a Pull Request the other day because the docs didn’t mention that the icons from Lucide they support only go up to a certain version number and I had to discover that myself. I can’t imagine the difficulty for something less obvious. It’s rather hard to improve the docs and suggest changes when I’ve no idea what’s missing or what is actually being described.
I know the devs are hard at work at many things, and I’m not here to criticize them for a lack of documentation when I’ve hardly made anything more advanced than simple websites. I really like the program and want to develop plugins but am finding it a tad difficult to do so when I’m lacking information.
That being said, perhaps the answers are in the Github. I’ll take a look at that.
I think the part you’re missing is the first quote; I’m not sure that’s the general vibe that I’ve seen.
No disrespect at all to the devs, but I have 6 plugins out now, and I spend most of my time developing them hunting around in console mode or just trying different combinations of parameters out until I find what works. Sometimes you’re lucky and you find another plugin repo with code you can use.
If there are good docs out there, please can someone direct me to them too
I may have misread someone praising some plugin docs and I though accidentally they were referring to obsidian docs itself.
At least I’m happy to see that I’m not stupid or missing something. The bad part is that I’ve already suffered exactly what you described in the past and Im not really excited to experience it again.
Yes, I saw it, but that doesn’t change anything. Github type defunitions are still the only source of information and the official API reference docs are useless
There was a post recently praising the developer docs. But at think the person was new to development and had made a relatively simple plugin, so maybe they didn’t experience the docs in their entirety.
Also the docs do have a Github where people can file issues and pull requests. Obviously they should just be better, but if you figure out stuff that’s missing you can help save others from the same problems. I don’t develop plugins (yet?) but I’ve been sporadically filing issues on the user docs.
Have you visited the two links that I have provided? Where is the information contsined i the JSDocs in the compiled reference? Thise are what are actually providing value, and they’re missing
The link is at the bottom of the docs home page, in the Contributing section:
If you see any errors or room for improvement on this site, feel free to open an issue or pull request on our GitHub repository. Thank you in advance for contributing!
