I think a community editions download is a great idea. However, there needs to be a focus on use case. For example, there’s another thread discussing why Obsidian seems to do better at attracting users, or Notation for that matter. So there should be a focus on what draws users to those platforms and creating an edition of TW that’s similar for new users. Like how some Linux distros, like Mint, try to look like Windows to ease the transition.
That’s a great idea, but that is a huge project when there are some low-lying fruit that really need some tender loving care.
For example:
It might be a good idea to first consider updating the “Examples” Page and convert it into something much more glitzy (marketing-wise, it needs to really scream out what all can be done with TiddlyWiki), and rebadged as “Showcase TiddlyWiki Creations” (or whatever).
This page really needs to be front and center, needs some serious jazzing-up of the “wow” factor, and needs to be continuously updated (I.e. give it some life, because it looks dead and pitiful) such that people regularly take a look at it to see what is new.
https://tiddlywiki.com/#Examples
However, like all things: spirit is strong, but flesh is weak. It takes people who have the passion and the time.
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Much can be done to improve the site in general but my proposal is specifically about making the visitor ASAP understand that “wow, this can solve MY needs! - I download this and start filling it with my content!”
I think this actually IS the purpose with Editions but that tiddler not visible and many of the eight editions therein are very “odd”.
Your proposal to pimp up the Examples tiddler is also interesting but it concerns something else. Seeing a general mix of abandoned projects is not reeally the same as “for me”.
It takes people who have the passion and the time.
Well, decent enough versions of what I envision should actually not take a lot of work! I’d say a typical “application edition” could stick with default TW and just have some plugins installed. Perhaps a few custom tiddlers to show how they are used. I can, and would, certainly be willing to create a few of these but I am, of course, limited by my own life experience.
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Yup, I understood that.
The kind of stuff you’re suggesting, it has been suggested before. It can’t be an easy thing to do if it hasn’t happened yet.
There are all kinds of different things that could be done to attract more users. I’m suggesting hitting those things that are the quickest bang for the buck.
I’m a big fan of quick and easy things that bring about results quickly, however big/small. Big results are nice, but not when they take forever to get there.
If you can rally the resources to do what you are suggesting such that it provides immediate benefit, A-1.
I’m just back from a break, and so will answer briefly for now. The specific suggestion is reasonable, but as others have noted there might be better ways to achieve a similar result, such as a download wizard that allows plugins to be pre-installed.
I’m open to improvements to the visitor experience on tiddlywiki.com; the major constraint is just that it remains a TiddlyWiki.
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I have fallen down on the job—repeatedly!—but hope to be able to return to creating a Recipe Edition in the near future. The discussions linked to in the first post help describe a mechanism for creating some useful beginner editions. I think having such editions created and easily findable on tiddlywiki.com would be a great start at this. I can’t think of a way to do anything similar with plug-ins, though; they are simply too varied, and there are too many of them; it would likely scare away newbies.
Yea, my main point here is that “easily findable” isn’t enough; we need to ensure that they see it so they can make a correct judgement about TW vis a vis their needs, so it has to be served in-their-faces. The current green download button and the savers do this but they assume that the visitors are already at the stage where they want to set up their own local TW, and even ready enough to do the mental work around the saver issues. That’s no modest assumption.
I can’t think of a way to do anything similar with plug-ins, though; they are simply too varied, and there are too many of them; it would likely scare away newbies.
Right, plugins are a later matter. It’s too fine grained. Instead, the served editions have a few plugins thrown in from start. That is a big part of what makes it an edition, and what makes it suitable for their stereotypical use case (“cooking enthusiast”, “teacher”, “badminton tournament organizer”, …)
BTW, I’m guessing tiddlywiki.com could measure which editions are downloaded from it, which would be really valuable information in terms of finding out what users actually want.
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Agreed. We need a stronger adverb than “easily”. Once we have a reasonable handful of these, it would be great to have them in your face:
Download any of the following editions:
╔═══════════════════╗ ╔══════════════════╗ ╔══════════════════╗ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ Personal ║ ║ Reading ║ ║ Excercise ║ ║ Journal ║ ║ List ║ ║ Tracker ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ╚═══════════════════╝ ╚══════════════════╝ ╚══════════════════╝ ╔═══════════════════╗ ╔══════════════════╗ ╔══════════════════╗ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ Blog ║ ║ Genealogy ║ ║ Bibliography║ ║ ║ ║ Site ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ║ ╚═══════════════════╝ ╚══════════════════╝ ╚══════════════════╝You can also choose one of the 31 other community editions. [not a link - expands in place with more]
╔═══════════════════╗ ║ ║ ║ ║ Or start with the ║ Empty ║ ║ Edition ║ and build whatever you like! ║ ║ ║ ║ ╚═══════════════════╝
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@twMat I think adding the newer Tour plugin. Possibly with individualized tours for the editions would definitely help kickstart the users’ experience in a positive way
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Once we have a reasonable handful of these, it would be great to have them in your face:
I like that mockup (even dummy links!) Yes, that would make things very clear. Interestingly it suddenly reminds of the HelloThere tiddler! And, interestingly, we can already now begin to see different interest in the different editions: It seems people have clicked “geneaology” twice already!
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The Tour plugin, that’s an interesting idea. Will you do it? 
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… and then I had to go back and change the layout to incorporate the spacing for Discourse’s little counters!
Nobody is interested in the Exercise tracker edition! We should bring in the Beer and Hamburgers edition.
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When @Scott_Sauyet mentioned his recipe edition again a few posts up, this reminded me of a concept / suggestion idea I’ve had for a while, and while I may never get to it, I’ll share it in case it spawns other thoughts. Sorry for the longer comment in advance.
TiddlyWiki Cookbook
The concept is essentially to have a guide showing new users step-by-step of building their own Cookbook in TiddlyWiki. Goal is to bring together things I’ve wanted to help improve for new users:
- Make it quicker for users to learn new wikitext through consistent examples
- Allow users to learn wikitext as needed for those who learn best when faced with need
- Highlight that you can build great things at varying levels of complexity
- Have a template that is relatively conceptually similar to many use cases for TiddlyWiki
Components of the “Cookbook” concept
A. Have a basic set of tiddlers: recipes and ingredients - built into the starter wiki with obvious use of tags, lists, pictures, etc.
- Change all example wikitext examples in the docs to reference these same basic tiddlers. This reduces the amount of mental work understanding when and how to use them.
- Example: Learning the language R was made much easier for me by all code examples referencing one or two included tables (diamonds, cars).
- By contrast, in TiddlyWiki most filter operator examples have completely independent tiddler bases which causes you to investigate how the data is stored in order to understand it.
B. Have a guide in both text / tour format with accompanying video of building a Cookbook wiki
- Have multiple formats for multiple different learning styles
C. Have the guide(s) build things in steps of complexity, each complete, but limited to particular tools / techniques. Something like:
- Casual User: Limit to settings, formatting wikitext, built-in macros (list-links), basic filters (tag, etc.)
- Power User: Add widgets ($list), complex filters, templates, basic buttons w/ actions, html (tables)
- Pro User: Custom widgets, CSS tweaking, recursive procedures, pragmas, plugins, whatever
After building each level, celebrate that something cool and fully functional was completed, and if building that much stretched the technical skills, it’s good enough to stop. Or, keep going to add power. This could help with those people that come to TiddlyWiki never doing anything non-WYSIWYG before and that get intimidated with all the complex stuff you can do.
Once you get to the “next” level, you only get introduced to the new thing due to a NEED. For example when <<list-links>> is just not flexible enough, you need <$list>. When wiki table notation with the pipes needs to be generated by a <$list> so you change over to <table> notation, and when doing a \procedure isn’t enough and you need to build your own \widget.
As a conceptual template, “Cookbook” is fairly widely understood, and contains multiple levels (cookbook contains recipes, which contain ingredients, and those have properties etc.) that can stand in to many different use cases (I might think that for project management, projects are like recipes and tasks are like ingredients etc.). The name is also associated with learning, and guides in many cultures.
Anyways, those are just some of the ideas I’ve had based on things that I wish I’d have had during the learning process. I’ve left out quite a bit to keep this already long comment shorter.
I’ll need to figure out how to use it. I’ve only taken the tour so far 
I think there are many edition that is as friendly as TidGi (some user say TidGi lacks help gguide, so other edition may be more friendly than TidGi)
So I think here we need an edition generator. I’m consider making TidGi desktop to be a template repo, so everyone can use it to generate their own release of desktop app. That bring useful plugins and Notion-level UI, and most importantly can save to a folder on the disk without further configuration.
I recently eat Subway (sandwich) everyday.
Their app provides ingredients, but most people (even geek like me) will pick a preset with drink.
I think the ordering flow and UI design can be referenced.
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I completely concur that a handful of well thought out, documented and maintained editions would make an excellent starting point for new users. However, the real issue at present isn’t how to draw attention to editions or how to present them at tiddlywiki-com, but rather the scarcity of well designed and maintained editions to draw attention to.
Creating an edition is a significant amount of work upfront and also requires a commitment to provide support and maintenance afterwards. As a community, it might be time to explore options for supporting and incentivizing such ongoing work, perhaps through Open Collective.
Efforts to create and maintain editions that don’t intersect with one’s personal interests seem unlikely to be sustained over time. I personally maintain two very niche editions for a small group of users, and the key to maintaining my interest has been that I personally use these editions on a very regular basis.
Can we think of any editions that exist at present that are well designed, documented and maintained?
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While I certainly support the idea to incentivize such work, the question is not a binary between “well designed and maintaned editions” vs not fully so. It can be both because what is the goal here? It is to convert more of the tw.com visitors into users than what the site currently does!
To convert more visitors, I’d say that some merely decent demos would suffice - if the visitors are actually exposed to them. Of course, it would be even better if editions were more than just good enough. But “merely decent” editions would be a very good start.
If they are not up-to-date already after a year? Well, then they have converted visitors for a full year - yay! Besides, nothing is set in stone; if better starter-editions were to come up, they could just replace less polished/maintained ones.
I dare even say that the high standards typically held for tw.com and TW stuff, is a major reason why we don’t already have any real such editions. I can point to a dozen people here that have both enough know-how and willingness to create, or at least contribute to, decent enough “editions” for the above defined goal. I, myself, am certainly one of them. In terms of skills and quality, I’m no Jeremy/Saq/Mario/… but I’m 99% certain that I could excite visitors enough to convert more of them than what currently happens (the last percent is merely for modesty ) But there are many reasons why I don’t, including, at this moment, 202 reasons over at github.
…and, in that vein, before spending much time on this matter, I would need to know more what @jeremyruston actually thinks about this all, more than the brief comment above. It is a total waste of effort if Jeremy, being the sole gatekeeper, doesn’t approve of it in the first place.
I think there is a point to distinguish between demos (be they designed as actual demos or be they real-use wikis) - vs “starter editions” that I’d say would be more about something that visitors can “try out” and download to start to use for their own data. There is definitely a demo element to such a “starter edition”, but my point is that it would not make sense for anyone to currently have what you request because why would they?
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