Hey! As it came up yesterday in the chat: I think the shortcut from beta to group nodes into a subpatch or rather a Process (like it’s called these days) is badly missed.
The UX is pretty straight-forward here I think - select nodes, Ctrl+G and then a process with all inputs and outputs is created on the definitions of the document.
In my opinion it is also a great narrative to introduce the definitions side, by explaining where the process has gone after grouping nodes.
You can already do that on process nodes, per-operation.
Here the Toggle is enabling/disabling the Update operation inside the process that just logs an LFO to the console.
If you create an operation in a Process Node that does not have input pins, vvvv will give you this bool input that you can enable or disable from the outside to run the operation or not.
If you create an operation that has input pins, you have to right-click/configure the node to show the bool that controls whether the operation runs or not.
Here the LogSomeString operation inside the process node. It has an input pin, so soon as I connect something to it it starts running.
But I can also enable the boolean input that allows to control whether the operation runs or not from the outside, as can see there :
Ah, yes I guess that does not work anymore because if something is connected downstream then disabling this operation could have side effects…
I would suggest writing the result to a pad and create an operation that just reads from that pad. Like that you can disable the operation that writes to it, but the result would still exist if someone needs to consume it downstream.