Consider writing a contributer's guide

[deeplook]

I'm often stumbling over missing features in ipyleaflet that I believe would be easy to implement for someone with more of a Javascript background, and/or are not tackled for a substantial period of time, while sometimes reported by multiple people, due to different priorities. When I look at the code I can see it's usually not much for any given feature, but without being a leaflet pro I have a hard time to see the "grand architecture" and/or estimate the work needed.

Therefore I wonder if a "contributer's guide" explaining the architecture and outlining strategies for implementing new features would not maybe help accelerate contributions significantly?

[martinRenou]

I agree with you. It is a bit unclear to me where this documentation should be put, as it would be the same across most of the interactive widgets libraries. I guess we can put it in the https://github.com/jupyter-widgets/widget-cookiecutter project, and then put it in the documentation of ipyleaflet as well.

[deeplook]

The existing docs are mostly a gallery of example layers/controls and generating code, great to get started and copy/paste initial snippets to support one's own use-case. I do it quite often. The questions answered there so far are:

• What can I do with the package?
• What is a simple example for some layer/control?

What I think is increasingly needed is something that addresses questions like these ones:

• How do I wrap another existing leaflet "widget" in ipyleaflet for myself?
• How do I wrap one such that it can go into the package?
• How do I write a leaflet widget from scratch in a most ipyleaflet-ready way?
• How do I build something properly (javascript tooling)?
• How do I test it properly (javascript tooling)?
• What would be desired widgets to be contributed?
• What else would be desired contributions?
• What is not desired and why (policies)?

This would be helpful for example as simple things as creating a control widget on the map that simply hides or deletes a set of layers of some type (something that the current LayerControl cannot do).