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.
