I’m my own worse enemy. Probably making filters more complicated than it really is.
I have used TiddlyWiki for over a decade - but not the TiddlyWiki ‘Personal Notebook’ app so much. My approach to building web apps is using the TiddlyWiki JavaScript codebase and framework; boot.js, utils.js, the deserializers, etc. Has a lot of functions that handle common tasks that come up when building a custom web application.
It has all that is needed to build and interact with the DOM and data. Everything being a tiddler solves the data management problem where data can be correlated and interconnected using tags, backlinks, types, the ‘list’ and so forth. Is very complete so don’t really need any other modules to handle server/client/user interaction. Most modules I add are specific to interface to corp databases, financial institutions, and stuff provided by the customer that whats the site built.
Has a lot of useful source code and is easy to tweak. Especially when handling data coming in of different formats; REST, CSV, XML, Worksheets. Standardize into tiddlers, display dynamic pages (domMaker!), process the data, and output as needed.
I rarely used WikiText or filters. JS macros called $tw.utils
, $tw.wiki
and $tw.tiddler
functions to manage the data. In most cases had tiddlers organized in multiple $tw.wiki
instances.
It seems TiddlyWiki was designed to not only build a personal notebook app but also to be used as a core framework to develop custom web based systems. One would not even know the framework is TiddlyWiki - a completely different site. Is an awesome tool.
So am a WikiText beginner - know the rules, the syntax, if I can remember them. But hasn’t quite ‘clicked’ yet. Am in that frustrating time when know enough to be dangerous - but that light at the end of the tunnel is still just out of reach. Years ago had similar experience with JS regular expressions which now just come naturally.
What is happening to me, know what I want to do - but my filters end up being these long sequences of steps and runs and conditionals - knowing will look back some day and laugh - being clueless!
Would like to mention the filter syntax makes sense. The documentation is fine, more examples would be helpful. But there are 140+ filter operators. Bunch of categories, parameters (which can be hard or soft (which can be indirect or variable)) Some can be negated, some not. There just is a lot to it. Seems somewhere in there is a simpler language that’s screaming to get out - but what is there is what you got to have.
The other components - widgets, actions, macros, pragmas, plugins, styles for me are pretty straight forward. Just bumping my head on those filters. More than likely, some night will suddenly wake up and out of the blue - ‘I got it!’.