Bingo! And I think to the very good.
Kudos to YOU!
TW IS unusual in it’s evolution over time WITH pretty amazing backwards compatibility.
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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!’.
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Yep!
Although we’re complete opposites, we arrive at the same conclusion. (I’m definitely no dev.)
That is actually a compliment to TW.
It appeals to vastly different audiences for infinitely diverging reasons.
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Thanks @Maurycy for your feedback to the community.
With the right local or internet hosting look at the file uploads plugin work
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This interesting because I took no notice of this at all, I just wanted to know the capabilities behind it. Key is the level of User Interface customisation to make it how you want.
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Whilst a more fashionable look may help people who are “aesthetically sensitive” the look has to be an option for users, not a bespoke site.
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I favour the idea the tiddlywiki.com become such a showcase, perhaps with more than one fashionable layout people can select, and not a documentation resource, with the current (and improved) tiddlywiki.com hosted at tiddlywiki.org
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This would allow us to seperate the sometime competing issues of looking good and being a turbocharged documentation resource.
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This is an ongoing issue, for one simple reason, it has so many possibilities.
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This has come up many times and the conclusion was start publishing editions with different use cases.
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It may be wishful thinking but I persist in a belief I have not yet realised that there are ways to explain its capabilities to a general audience. Perhaps with editions displayed in the prose that demonstrates this.
- How does tiddlyhost fail to meet this?
It is feedback like yours @Maurycy we need, never apologise for being honest.
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I cant agree more but I think it is important to seperate this capability from that which is presented to naïve or non-technical users lest their “brain explodes”.
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I hope you can make your method’s publicly available, perhaps in the developer thread.
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Actually as a “techo” myself using tiddlywiki for its platform, IDE, SDK, repository, code library, code generator, site generator, pastebox etc… I am often also at risk of my “brain exploding”.
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@jeremyruston I just want to bring this to your attention, I believe you have said something similar in the past.
By showcase I and the discussion suggests a highly designed and fashionable website (based on a tiddlywiki option) that optimises catching peoples interest. Emphasis on “marketing”, in a non financial way, the Idea of tiddlywiki.
- I am confident the community has the skills and experience, but by spitting the competing interests between presentation (tiddlywiki.com) and documentation (tiddlywiki.org) it will be a somewhat simpler task.
@TW_Tones Let me try to address some of your points.
I’d argue that huge majority of users are aesthetically sensitive in one way or another, otherwise commercial websites wouldn’t invest so much money and time into optimizing every little detail and doing A/B tests of seemingly pointless stuff. They of course do that to optimize sales, but that’s no different then to optimize for TW users.
I’ve made this huge post about my thoughts on what could be possibly improved from the UX/Web Design perspective by comparing how similar commercial products design their front page - Derailing elephant - comparative analysis of TW front page
This actually plays into another problem with TW, community fragmentation. I initially started with just a standalone file thinking it’ll be good enough. By the time I wanted to host it in some capacity, I’ve stumbled upon the information that TiddlySpot is dead and I think for a while there was no TiddlyHost, and I must’ve read somewhere in some older Google Group thread that there is no hosting service currently, so when I stumbled upon TiddlyHost I just incorrectly either assumend it’s not working or it’s not worth the time.
Looking at it now, and looking from the perspective of an informed developer, I see the following things that would stop be from using it:
- No easily visible Pricing information – if it’s free I’d like to understand the extends of its freedom and if it’s donation-based or selling-your-data-based.
- No clear information about the limits - what’s the max allowed file size, transfer limits etc.
- The front page is a little bare in a way that in my inspires lack of confidence in either quality or consistency of the service. It’s difficult to explain, probably something to do with how it feels more lika a companion piece to TW than its own standalone hosting service, if that makes sense.
- I also saw some posts about Auto Save not working which sounds to me like it always sends the whole wiki upon save, and I really like having it save only whatever changes.
Right now the reason I wouldn’t switch is because I like having full control over my wikis and already made the time and money investment. I’d be happy to switch if some things were there, but maybe I shouldn’t derail this thread even more.
It is other problem, maybe the spliting your filters can help you, and then you can use little filter expression within filter and subfilter operator then you have more readable complex filter expression when you store them in variables/macros. See the examples of its use in docs https://tiddlywiki.com/#filter%20Operator:[[filter%20Operator]]%20[[subfilter%20Operator]]
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I want to highlight this, again.
IMO, it is currently inevitable that will happen with textual-based markup for advanced uses. Every system I looked at that evolves over time becomes symbol baroque (see: 3) eventually.
I dunno (not being an “on-the-current-programming-model-ball” person) what the solution is.
There may not be one?
Just a comment
TT
As other have mentioned the syntax is complicated because there is so much capability in the language. I myself set the editor font-family to Input Sans. This can be done from the Settings - Appearance - Theme Tweaks
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