Class Register

[G McAlpine]

Hi,

I've only been using TiddlyWiki for a couple of weeks although I'm sure I must have crossed paths with it some years ago and then forgotten about it.

I've made a demo Class/Student Attendance Register on tiddlyspot.com called testregister and I thought I'd post it here as it may or may not be of interest to someone. I'm sure this has already been done but I'd still be interested if anyone has a minute to comment.

Thanks,

Gordon

[hobbyist writer]

Hi Gordon,

I tried to have a look, but this is where I ended up:

Best,
Mehdi

[G McAlpine]

Sorry, I just saw your previous post regarding TW5.

Don't know why it's not working for you but it's at the address below.

testregister.tiddlyspot.com

On Wednesday, June 24, 2015 at 2:07:10 AM UTC+1, hobbyist writer wrote:

Hi Gordon,

I tried to have a look, but this is where I ended up:

Best,
Mehdi

[Jed Carty]

This looks good. While it may not be particularly complex this is the sort of thing we need. New and exciting additions to what TiddlyWiki can do are good, but having an example of an immediately useful application is a big part of what we need to get more attention for TiddlyWiki so making things like this is important.

I have found that TiddlyWiki is very good for creating fillable forms and generating tiddlers automatically. Click on the `New Task` button here to see a complex example of what I mean, here is a much simpler example. Using things like that makes adding things like classes or students in your wiki much easier. Once you have made the form to generate tiddlers you don't have to worry about manually editing tiddlers, which is helpful when someone who is unfamiliar with tiddlywiki is using what you make.

[hobbyist writer]

The link was somehow broken at least for me. It's working now.

It's definitely nice and helpful to see new use cases. Your implementation is neat as it is. Not cluttered. For creating new group/course/student, you might be interested in wrapping your code inside a tiddler. You can find a basic implementation of Contact DB here: tw5magick.tiddlyspot.com.

[RichardWilliamSmith]

Hi Gordon,

This is really great - thanks very much for sharing it. I'm putting together the education portal for tiddlywiki and I'd love to feature it as an example of what can be made with relative ease and speed, if that's ok? I agree with Jed that examples of this kind are most useful for demonstrating what can be achieved.

Regards,

Richard

[Måns]

Hi Gordon

Impressive implementation of simple concepts in a TW after just two weeks!! 

Very well done sir :-) and thank you very much for sharing this excellent  proof of concept.

I will show your example to my co-teachers - and I'm sure they will see the potential right away :-)

First thing I did when I saw your class register was to tag the StudentTemplate tiddler with $:/tags/ViewTemplate and add this extra filter before the filters already there:

"<$list filter="[is[current]tag[student]!prefix[$]]">" 

Then I added the field list-after with value "$:/core/ui/ViewTemplate/tags" and removed the template call("$param="StudentTemplate"") from the create new student button in the GroupTemplate.

The reason why I did this is that I don't like to fill the text area in student tiddlers with template text (filter expressions and other "system text"). Imo it can be very confusing for a user to see all this text when you just want to add some other text in a tiddler. I guess that inputting template text in each and every student, group and class tiddler will also make the TW file size grow pretty fast.

I would change the GroupTemplate tiddler and the ClassTemplate in the same way and they will automatically show up/be transcluded in tiddlers tagged with group and class respectively.

I think your system works fine as it is. 

My proposed change in working with templates as part of the ViewTemplate is just a little optimization (imo). 

You can easily adapt it if you like to make it even more simple for someone else to use it to write text in the text area of student, class or group tiddlers.

Enjoy Måns Mårtensson

[G McAlpine]

Thanks Richard, Of course I'm happy for you to share it, extend it and use it however you wish.  I used the TaskManagementExample as a starting point when making the register so I think that it's useful to have simple easy to follow examples to help and inspire others start their own projects.

[G McAlpine]

Thanks Måns,

I'm very interested in ways to keep the file size down and optimize so I'll definitely try your suggestions.  

It was my intention to keep it as simple as possible as I was inspired by the TaskManagementExample and I love the fact that you can simply copy and paste the code and start playing around without having to learn about plugins or transcluding.  I was tempted to use some of the code from tw5magick, which is very impressive, but it confused me a little because so much of the code relies on custom macros/plugins.  I wanted my example to be pure TiddlyWiki and simple to follow.  I even restrained myself from going overboard on the custom Tag styles which are really just there to show what is possible.

To create something for a novice TiddlyWiki user  the needs to be less in their face and I wondered if commenting is possible in wikiText e.g. "===== DO NOT EDIT BELOW THIS LINE======"

I think for this solution to work properly the user needs to also retain the power of TiddlyWiki in order to capture whatever other information relating to their teaching they require.  The idea is to combine the task of tacking attendance, which is usually done using excel, a dedicated app or a printed document, with the task of keeping class and student notes and that way neither task will be forgotten.  One application, all the information.

Thanks for your comments it's good to know when you're going in the right direction.  Also, 2 weeks of TiddlyWiki but a lifetime spent messing about with code :)