Custom Author Options coming to WeakAuras

Hi there, EmptyRivers here. 

Since this is my very first post on our Patreon, let me introduce myself: I've been part of the WeakAuras Dev Team for approximately 6 months now. My biggest contribution to WeakAuras was implementing the Aura Update feature, which was the main feature of WeakAuras 2.7.0. Additionally, I expanded the capabilities of our icon glow effect by integrating Deezo's LibCustomGlow library and drastically decreased export string size and performance by using SafeteeWoW's LibDeflate library. Many thanks to them for writing those libraries!

The project which I am wrapping up as you read this (and is already in the 2.10.0 alpha builds) is custom options, inspired by this ticket. Traditionally, if an author would like to add customizability to their code, they would need to include a section in the init action of their code where users are expected to edit some configuration values. This works, but has a few issues:

• Having to edit code is super scary to a lot of people.
• It's not wholly obvious where to go to find the configuration if you don't already know where it is.
• It's easy to screw it up and cause the code to not compile, edit code you're not supposed to, or give inputs that the author didn't expect.

To address these concerns, I added a new tab to the options pane that you can see above.

Authors can now provide a full GUI of buttons and switches for their users. It will update the new aura_env config table that you can then use to alter the functionality of your aura.

So what do we gain from that?

• Users who aren't comfortable with editing code can feel confident that they won't accidentally break something they don't understand.
• Since the new GUI is hosted in a top-level tab, it's easy to find.
• Authors can be confident that they will always get configuration values that they prepared for.

All in all, I think this will be a great addition for both the people who make complex auras with lots of custom code, and for users who install these complex auras. This feature is documented here and it will be a part of version 2.10.0 of WeakAuras, which will be released soon.

If you run into any issues, please hop into our Discord or open a ticket!