4 - Where can I get the nice help templates used by Else/Cyclone &cet?
Everything I've found online seems to be both massively out of date
and expects that you already know how to use it.
As the one who worked on the help files of the two libraries you cited, I can say I don't really know :) haha...
well, the most recent date I find is for Template 11 in 2007. I do realize that a Template 13 does exist, but I haven't been able to find the date for it. Generally code that hasn't been touched for 13 years has suffered some level of bit-rot. None of the templates make it very clear how to actually go about customizing them. I've opened up a couple and there are a lot of canvases with receive symbols, so it looks like perhaps one is meant to send messages in order to get text into some of the fields. Other things like some of the font manipulations and separator bars are also unclear.
Of course, my practice with PD is almost entirely about making things that go "boop" and not pretty images, so maybe there is just a large gap in my knowledge of the basic language primitives. It would be nice to have some clearer idea of how to even get started with the templates though, because I'm not sure that I really want to spend a month or more of my Copious Free Time (tm) figuring out how to use a complex programming object to hold documentation when I could bang our web pages in a day or three.
Anyway Cyclone 0.2 had this template I'm not sure exactly where it came from, and I just made some variations on it. You can check PD-l2ork's help structure, I guess it came from there... see "all_about_help_patches.pd".
hmmm...kay. This is arguably a thing that needs some love though.