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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@twMat you alluded specifically to editions that can be an alternative to the empty edition in your original post. So which is it? Demos that serve as an example of possible functionality, or editions that are preconfigured for specific use cases? The difference is important especially if the intent is to make them directly downloadable alongside the empty edition, as you suggested. Otherwise you are conflating two things that really need to be considered separately in terms of how they are presented.
Furthermore, as regarding demos, I am quite skeptical as to how useful that we could be in driving adoption, most users that do not want to learn the intricacies of wikitext want something that works reasonably well out of the box. Alternatively if we do want to make it easier to get started with building functionality with wikitext, a step by step guide to building a set of features as described by @stobot would likely be more useful.
Can you point to any examples of editions, or guides or tutorials or demos, that were suggested for listing on tw-com and rejected?
We already have a Community Editions tiddler and an argument can be made for making the editions listed there more prominent. One could even imagine linking to a dedicated editions.tiddlywiki.org site.
However, I see nothing at present that prevents any community member from creating an edition and asking to have it listed there. In fact I see editions listed there now that were created by far less experienced wikitext coders than most of the regulars here and that have plenty of cruft under the covers, but provide a useful experience regardless and are thus rightfully listed there.
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Good you’re pointing out my inconsistencies! There are indeed two parallel concepts in my mind; one is a direct download button, only showing the “name” of the edition or perhaps a “card” with a very brief explanation, compare to the current cards in HelloThere. Basically what @Scott_Sauyet sketched here above.
…and the other has similar looking buttons but that instead open an InnerWiki or similar to basically show what they will get if they click the download button which is now also seen. Here’s an (inofficial) mockup of this.
What would be the correct term for this set-up:
- based on an empty edition
- plus a few installed plugins
- a few native settings have been changed
- some dummy sample tiddlers that are not part of a plugin (e.g some groceries for a “Grocery edition”)
- an “About” type tiddler with some introductory/explanatory notes about the specific setup
- a tiddler listing all “deviations” from the empty edition (including e.g a “delete all dummytiddlers” button and similar)
The users first step towards an informed go-or-dismiss decision is the very name on “the button” on tw.com (i.e “Geneaology edition”, “Grocery shopping edition”, …) and when they actually see it, they see whatever the edition-constructor decided was appopriate to show. The content/layout/setup/UX/… may vary greatly depending on target group, this is up to the expertise of the constructor. But it probably shows a few of the above listed bits. Hopefully this convinces the visitor to click download, if it wasn’t already the downloaded he/she fiddled with. If there is a quick demo in an innerwiki, it may differ a tad from what is downloaded, e.g default-tiddlers, but I’d guess it is mostly the same.
What would be an appropriate term for this/these?
Oh, I fully agree! The edition constructors should set-up the wikis to be as turn-key as possible. And they, in a role of experts, know best what the target group wants. I couldn’t make a decent soccer edition even if I wanted to.
IMO this is looking at it from the wrong direction. The fact that there are only 8 editions there, after all these years, several of which I’d think come from Jeremy, is a very clear indication that something is not encouraging people to contribute editions - in spite of there being quite a few “sharers” among us.
We already have a Community Editions tiddler and an argument can be made for making the editions listed there more prominent.
Sure. But “prominent ≠ shown”.
However, I see nothing at present that prevents any community member from creating an edition and asking to have it listed there.
So, what is your guess as to why this basically doesn’t happen?
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Your focus in this thread would seem to imply that the lack of prominent mention on tw-com is the reason for the scarcity of community editions. I would be very surprised if this was indeed the case.
The significant investment of time and effort required to create and maintain something reusable for others as opposed to specific to ones own specific circumstances, along with the knowledge and expertise of both wikitext and also of the domain in question.
Again, thanks for your valuable points.
The significant investment of time and effort required to create and maintain something reusable for others
What if someone, somehow, manages to produce editions that succeed in adpoting users (more than it scares away) - but the editions were not quite as burdensome to create as you describe? Would you agree that they are still worth featuring on tw-com? Is there, for example, anything problematic in the rough bullet list I posted above (which more or less only talks about content)? And is there a minimum “duration” that editions must last in your opinion (ref maintainence)?
In principle, not at all, though it really would depend on the utility offered by any such edition.
If the intent is to offer the editions for download alongside empty.html then the minimum requirement for maintenance would be:
- the edition should be on the current version of TiddlyWiki, which implies keeping it updated at pace with core releases.
- any serious flaws identified by users should be addressed in a timely manner
- any problems with the documentation that make it difficult to understand the intent, workflow and utility offered by the edition are addressed in a timely manner.
- hosted on tw-com
On the other hand, if we only want to present these editions as examples of what is possible, then the requirements for maintenance can be significantly relaxed.
I feel like this should be a neccesary point to discuss: we should also talk about the archiving and versioning of these editions.
One of the main reoccurring issues I’ve seen is that, due to each edition being an indepentent project, they are left under the care of their creators to keep maintained and available.
In the event that the site hosting that edition is terminated then… now you have a dead link on the homepage of our wonder tool 
I propose whenever someone wants to introduce a new community edition, it should be put to a poll here, and if it is approved, a copy should be downloaded and kept in a github page, maybe under the same one as the core tiddlywiki5 github, but as a branch(I may be referring to that incorrectly? I don’t use github, I wish I knew more about it.) that way, updates can still be pushed to it, but in the event the creator goes dark, it remains available to the community.
It would also mean that by adopting it as a community edition, the creator would have to agree to it receiving the same copyright terms as the vanilla edition, free to use, modify, etc.
Just thought this was something worth bringing up 
See some of the previous discussions in Community curated editions - How best to coordinate our efforts? and others linked at the top of its first post.
We probably shouldn’t spend more thinking on this before Jeremy clarifies how he sees the ideas thus far…
…but…
I think it would be much better with “minimal admin” like so: Be less restrictive and demanding what is put up, but be firm on what is taken away! The nature of this project is that people abandon projects - let’s accept this. We could automate to see if links are actually dead and they are removed, and I think we can rely on members reporting when some edition is outdated and it is also removed.
…or it can simply be demoted to the tiddler “Community Editions” (one of the tiddlers that you, like the resto of us, had no idea existed even if it sits in one of the default tiddlers).
The nature of the TW project is that both people and things come and go and change. If anything, the tw-com site would do well some more frequent changes. Imagine if the editions had small but nice cards (even just gradients). A little rearrangement among them from removing an outdated edition-button or two might even be visually positive.
If the owner updates the edtion well, then it might appear again. Also that can perhaps be automated.
I wonder if we shouldn’t do this stand-alone first… with the goal of folding it back into the main page, but only once the kinks are worked out.
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when reading through this thread i had the same thought.
each core version update would require updating the list of editions to ensure they are updated, and right after a core release it is likely that many will not be updated yet so that section would be pretty empty.
who is responsible for monitoring the status of editions submitted and making sure the website is up to date with releases (hopefully not Jeremy)? who compiles the running list of submitted editions and determines which are high-quality enough for their use case to be presented so prominently on the front page of the platform? a flimsy edition, or lack of suitable editions, would make a bad first impression for new users i feel 