Help finding the guides I need?
 

Wow...there's so many resources here, I'm not sure where to start looking. I want to write a patch to add a feature to one of my favorite addons. I'm trying to figure out where to get started. While I'm new to lua, I'm not new to software dev. I just need some pointers to find the resources I'm looking for.

Is there anything that describes the process of making a patch? Or is it best to just grab one and "use the source, Luke"?

Also, is there any offline testing tools or do I have to run ESO to debug?

Thanks in advance,
-Cory

Welcome to ESOUI!

You should read these two things first if you are just getting started:

• Getting Started
• SimpleNotebook Tutorial

The wiki also contains plenty other useful resources and if you have questions you can always pay us a visit in the ESOUI Gitter channel.

Making a patch for an existing addon is basically grabbing the addon, modifying it and uploading it as a new version of the addon. If the original author has gone missing and you plan to take it over, you can try to contact them via pm or reach out to Cairenn or Dolby (admins) and ask for advice.

Testing an addon is only really possible in ESO itself, so you will need to have it running. Its Lua engine is based on Lua 5.1 so you could try run some unit tests, but you will have to add a lot of mock objects in all likelyhood.