Final Checks Before Release of v5.3.4

jeremyruston · June 9, 2024, 10:44am

TiddlyWiki v5.3.4 is due to be released on 27th June 2024. Before that happens we would appreciate everyone helping with testing the new release.

This release includes some interesting improvements:

New Tour Plugin allowing interactive learning tours to be created and presented in TiddlyWiki. Try it out at https://tiddlywiki.com/prerelease/tour
New Test Case widget for displaying complete, self-contained interactive examples showing the output together with a tabbed display of the constituent tiddlers that produce it
New Geospatial Plugin that enables non-developers to build sophisticated interactive geospatial applications

Other changes include:

New stability badges for core plugins to highlight which plugins are stable, experimental, legacy or deprecated
Extended WidgetMessage: tm-http-request to be able to use Basic Authentication
Added button to the JavaScript error popup allowing tiddlers to be saved to a local JSON file
Added $timestamp attribute to ActionDeleteFieldWidget
Added new backtranscludes Operator
Improved tm-permalink, tm-permaview and tm-copy-to-clipboard messages to allow the notification text to be customised
Over twenty bug fixes

The prerelease is available at:

https://tiddlywiki.com/prerelease

There are several ways you can help:

Visit the prerelease on the web, explore the release note and try out the new features. Let us know if the release note or documentation is not clear
Use the prerelease upgrader at https://tiddlywiki.com/prerelease/upgrade.html to make a test upgrade of your own single file wiki and try out your usual workflows. It is suggested that you use a copy of your real life wikis, ie complex wikis that you’ve tweaked and personalised over a long time, so that the new version is tested under tough conditions
If using Node.js, download the prerelease from GitHub - Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5: A self-contained JavaScript wiki for the browser, Node.js, AWS Lambda etc. and try it with your own data and plugins

Any feedback is welcome here, or on GitHub.

Please wait until the official release before updating your day-to-day wikis, and remember the first rule of TiddlyWiki: to make sure to take (and verify) backups before doing anything risky.

Best wishes

Jeremy

vilc · June 9, 2024, 12:40pm

Looking forward to the release!

Is the transcludes operator also new in v5.3.4? It is documented including an example, but it’s not mentioned on the release page, and its docs do not have any version flair.

vilc · June 9, 2024, 1:10pm

A small details that needs documenting: it is not mentioned that the transcludes and backtranscludes operators recognize only “hard” transclusions, similar to links/backlinks operators and hard/soft links.

From my testing so far it looks like these are working:

brace syntax {{HelloThere}}
transclude widget with literal parameter <$transclude $tiddler="HelloThere" />
- also works inside another widget, e.g. list, as long as the $tiddler parameter is literal, not variable

The following are not working:

anything supplied as a macro or procedure
tranclude widget with variable $tiddler parameter <$list filter="HelloTHere"> <$transclude $tiddler=<<currentTiddler>> />

This seems very similar the situation with links, so I presume this is not easy to overcome. But if so, it would be nice to document it. I’d be glad to contribute to the documentation if I become some confirmation that my thinking and experiments here are correct.

linonetwo · June 9, 2024, 2:38pm

That’s true, because it share the same code with backlink. And handling soft transclusion will need to render full wiki, which will take a lot of calculation.

Doc update is welcome!

jeremyruston · June 9, 2024, 2:51pm

Hi @vilc you are correct that v5.3.4 also includes the “transcludes” filter operator, and that it is currently undocumented. As you note, just like with links, these operators only work correctly with static transclusions. Documentation updates would be welcome.

Mohammad · June 9, 2024, 4:35pm

Thank you Jeremy for all your efforts and also many thanks to all contributors.
This revision makes TiddlyWiki more powerful.

We now have a dozen filter operators that allow intermediate users to create a comprehensive node explorer, featuring links, backlinks, tagging, transcludes, and backtranscludes. Now one can easily create the Zettelkasten edition of TiddlyWiki and this makes TW an invaluable tool for the second brain.

The tour plugin and testcase widgets enable the creation of comprehensive wikis for learning and education.

@SaqImtiaz

Is it possible to use https://saqimtiaz.github.io/tw5-docs-pr-maker/ and submit documentation improvement to the prerelease branch?

CodaCoder · June 9, 2024, 4:36pm

@jeremyruston

I’ve reported this before (but I’ve forgotten where)

In the Tour example, using “show me a hint”, the focus/spotlight is a few pixels off:

Win10 Firefox and Chrome latest.

vilc · June 10, 2024, 9:18am

I’ve created a PR with documentation updates to the transcludes and backtranscludes operators:
Improve docs of transcludes and backtranscludes operators by mateuszwilczek · Pull Request #8247 · Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5 (github.com)

jeremyruston · June 10, 2024, 10:41am

Thanks @CodaCoder I am unable to duplicate that problem with Chrome or Firefox on the Mac. Do you get the same problem with the demos shipped with the Dynannotate plugin?

https://tiddlywiki.com/prerelease/#%24%3A%2Fplugins%2Ftiddlywiki%2Fdynannotate%2Fexamples%2Fspotlight

CodaCoder · June 10, 2024, 12:55pm

jeremyruston · June 10, 2024, 1:57pm

Hi @CodaCoder it is not clear whether you are reporting that image as being broken or not broken. It looks similar but not identical to my results:

How do the other examples look?

It’s very hard to imagine a fault that is affecting both Chrome and Firefox given that they have entirely different rendering engines.

CodaCoder · June 10, 2024, 2:06pm

Sorry. I thought it was clear. The dynanotate demo works fine to my eyes. Only the tour plugin has the reported issue.

Spotlighting a button works too.

I agree. But that’s where we are.

Firefox:

Chrome

Edge (Chromium of course)

CodaCoder · June 10, 2024, 2:16pm

This is an Azure VM running a test env Firefox (note the automation address bar) – bare bones, minimal install, almost no plugins, clean profile, zero cookies etc.

Springer · June 10, 2024, 2:38pm

I still think it’s a very bad look to have people search for “help” and find none:

vilc · June 10, 2024, 4:03pm

I can confirm the bug on every browser on Windows 10 I’ve tried: Firefox, Edge, Vivaldi (also chromium based).
It doesn’t occur neither on Firefox in a Linux VM nor on any Android browser I’ve tried: Firefox, Vivaldi.
So it seems to occur on Windows only.

Ste_W · June 10, 2024, 5:15pm

@jeremyruston what have you done? The tour thing looks great, I’m going to have to do things with it for my students. So. Many. Things…

Mohammad · June 10, 2024, 5:42pm

@vilc,

Thank you for correcting the docs. Just note that, transcludes and backtranscludes recognize the below transclusions and backtranscludions. Based on your definition, these hard transclusion/backtransclusion.

<$transclude $tiddler="HelloThere"/>

<$tiddler tiddler="HelloThere">
<$transclude $tiddler="some-template"/>
</$tiddler>

vilc · June 10, 2024, 8:52pm

The spacing in the tour plugin demo at https://tiddlywiki.com/prerelease/tour seems to have quite big spacing. The top margin above the instructions seems to be proportional to the window width. On standard 1920x1080 desktop screens the tiddlers in the demo and the “Next” button below them require scrolling in many cases, even though there is more than enough space to fit everything on screen.
The screenshot below is on a 1920x1200 screen:

Screenshot on a window snapped to half of the screen, so 960x1200:

It’s a bit counterintuitive that more content is visible in a smaller window.

It seems that the instructions are more or less centered on the whole viewport – this looks good if they are short and there are no tiddlers below.

Does it depend on the configuration of this particular demo tour, or would any tour made with the plugin look similarly out of the box?

In any case, I think it would be nice to adapt it so that less vertical screen space is wasted on typical desktop screens.

Springer · June 10, 2024, 10:53pm

With the tour: In addition to the disconcerting fact that users are specifically prompted to search for “help,” only to discover that apparently “there is none” (within that tour wiki) , there’s a weird thing at the end of the tour at the moment:

It seems to offer an additional/subsequent tour of the tag feature (after finishing the intro tour), but then that tour is over as soon as it starts.

vilc · June 11, 2024, 6:46am

Just adding two more screenshots to better visualize what @Springer had in mind, but I didn’t get from the screenshots before I took the complete tour myself. The tour indeed asks to explicitly search for “help” and then throws confetti upon not finding any matches