Fix up the help system
Jonathan, we've already talked about this a little bit in personal mail, but I'd like to also put it up here as a reminder, because I think that this is an important issue.
This is probably going to be a lot of work, but in order to make purr-data really work as a pd-extended successor, we have to work on the help system. Right now it only serves as a basic search facility to find help patches, but this isn't very novice-friendly and doesn't really allow you to discover things or learn about Pd when starting from scratch.
To these ends, we really need to fix up the broken links and provide a kind of menu-driven access to (at least) the original Pd help patches (the stuff that's readily available in vanilla Pd's "Browser/Pure Data" help menu) which are also referred to in Miller's book and which I consider an important resource especially for beginners. Right now there's no convenient way to access these at all (at least I couldn't find any, please correct me if I'm wrong).
One area that I've already worked on is to make all of the available help patches searchable (not just the patches under doc). This requires some minor changes in the search engine. I already have this in the release branch of my fork at https://git.purrdata.net/aggraef/purr-data from which I built all my Arch and Ubuntu packages of purr-data, so it should be easy to provide this as a patch or pull request in order to get it merged into the official sources.
I can also help with getting the dangling links in the pddp documentation patches fixed as I discover them (and as time permits; there are lots of them).
But I think that what is most urgently needed is a convenient way to access the aforementioned original Pd help patches, and I'm not sure what's the best way to provide this. As this set of help patches is rather stable, just preparing some toc-like help patches with links to this material might be a workable solution, but that's tedious work. Instead, I guess that it should be possible to have these tocs generated automagically in JavaScript and presented below the search box in purr-data's help browser. I'm not sure how to implement this, though.