I have to say though - in the interests of simplicity I do rather like my original idea, that the tiddlers that store the list of tiddlers are pretty much copies of the storyriver tiddler that are used to restore the field of the story river to a former state by copying across the field contents of the storage tiddler.
I wary that a drive to generalise ends up creating something bigger and more complicated and less hackable by someone with medium level skills.
I think I am capable of writing this plugin myself but since oeyoews is already on the case then I am happy to stand back and wait for his version and perhaps tinker with it if required.
I favour simplicity and adaptability - I don’t use the standard Tiddlywiki tools like the tags manager that much preferring my own custom tabs with tools I have written or customised to work the way I want them to. I prefer to see low level functionality provided which eases the task for anyone who does not like the standard model for a particular workflow as imposed by a a particular UI to build their own that fits in with their workflow.
Its a difficult call - generality vs something that is designed to do the job but I do think there is an inherent and pleasing simplicity in a design that involves managing tiddlers that are effectively really just copies of the story river at different points in the history - they can be exclusively tagged, deleted, copied and modified - the transparent simplicity of the data model I feel suggests a final implementation that will be simple and easily customised according to taste.
1, Create tagged ‘copy’ of the Story river.
2. Side bar tab or similar to list tiddlers identified as copies mentioned in 1.
3. Row of buttons to the side of each tiddler in the sidebar list to perform operations including “restore story river to this”.
The model I suggested is I feel a very simple and potentially robust model - it simply “clones” and manages copies of the storyriver tiddler, conceptually simple and very hackable.
Maybe I am mis-judging alternative solutions, maybe I don’t have enough Tiddlywiki core vision to really say but my instinct here is that a simple “pure” design is perhaps in danger of getting complicated.