growth-confusion

[Kriss]

Hello guys,

I am confused about the use of the different TW spin-offs.

I am organizing a large international benefit event and during the preparation phase, I have been using tiddlywiki as a tool to structure my ideas, collect all the information (background-info, lists of all kinds, contact-info (with TaggedTemplateTweak),...) and write a descriptive document about the different aspects of the project.
(I have been using TW for 2 years now, on Firefox (most often on Prism) in combination with Dropbox and on andtidwiki for my android phone - the portable and off-line functionality is important to me)

Now I have reached the point where the concept is mature, I need to start sharing the information with other people: the volunteers that help in implementing the project, and later-on maybe partners and sponsors.

There are close to 700 tiddlers in this wiki, with lots of links/transclusions and many also with automated contents (FET-lists and such)

As I understand Tiddlywiki is intended as a personal document and it was never really suited for collaboration with different people at the same time. So I think I will have to move away and towards spaces or tiddlyweb or ... I don't know; I am confused.

(I have experimented with the spaces concept, but it seems all the tiddlers can be accessed? Can I reuse my TW layout in spaces?
(I use a modified color scheme with the left and right sidebars removed and a small topmenu, conform to and suitable for andtidwiki)

So I want to share my tiddlers; some of them can be publicly available (visible, not editable), others should only be visible to certain people. These people would be grouped in different user profiles.
I estimate there could be up to 20 people to modify tiddlers. (with only a few changes per day; the tool mainly being used as a reference tool)
And for example sponsors could see more tiddlers than the general public, but neither should be able to make changes.
Overall, the content/structure would be mainly managed by just one or two people, with small contributions (only text/markup, no coding or such) from the other users
(f.e. change contact information or add a journal report)

The user group will not be very large; but It is quite diverse so I would still need a good and flexible user-management.

What would you recommend as the best way to go?
* some plugin for TW and share it on dropbox ?
** TW5 ?
* move the content to spaces or tiddlyweb? How does user management function here?
**  create my own server?
* maybe do I need to move to mediawiki or some of the other platforms with a stronger user management !?  (I would not like this option! But if needed, could you recommend any?)

Saving TW in the browser seems to be a neverending concern. Does Spaces experience similar problems?
On the other hand, could I still (how?) access a spaces implementation offline?


Thanks in advance for any advice or helpful comments.

[Jeremy Ruston]

Hi Kriss

Thanks for your message, I'm not the best person to respond to all of it, but I'll try to answer from my perspective.

I am confused about the use of the different TW spin-offs.

Yes, the world of TiddlyWiki can be mesmerisingly confusing and messy, maybe more so than many other open source projects because the barriers to experimentation with TiddlyWiki are so low. Ever the optimist, I see the mess in positive terms as a rich and fecund environment for innovation. It probably doesn't help that I'm one of the world's worst documentation updaters.

 

I am organizing a large international benefit event and during the preparation phase, I have been using tiddlywiki as a tool to structure my ideas, collect all the information (background-info, lists of all kinds, contact-info (with TaggedTemplateTweak),...) and write a descriptive document about the different aspects of the project.
(I have been using TW for 2 years now, on Firefox (most often on Prism) in combination with Dropbox and on andtidwiki for my android phone - the portable and off-line functionality is important to me)

Great stuff. 

 

Now I have reached the point where the concept is mature, I need to start sharing the information with other people: the volunteers that help in implementing the project, and later-on maybe partners and sponsors.

There are close to 700 tiddlers in this wiki, with lots of links/transclusions and many also with automated contents (FET-lists and such)

As I understand Tiddlywiki is intended as a personal document and it was never really suited for collaboration with different people at the same time. So I think I will have to move away and towards spaces or tiddlyweb or ... I don't know; I am confused.

The aspect of TiddlyWiki that makes it suitable as a personal document is the way it handles saving changes locally, giving us all the power of being able to work offline. It's also the main aspect that breaks down when we try to use TiddlyWiki as a multiuser system, where more than one person is making changes to the data.

In the multiuser situation some sort of server is needed if you want to be able to resolve contention when multiple people try to simultaneously alter the same thing. Over the years, there have been a wide variety of server implementations for TiddlyWiki. I believe that the most popular contemporary implementations are TiddlyWeb/TiddlySpace and GieWiki.

From TiddlyWiki's perspective, using a server makes surprisingly little difference. One adds an adaptor that synchronises changes to and from the server, but from the perspective of the TiddlyWiki core everything is much the same.

(I have experimented with the spaces concept, but it seems all the tiddlers can be accessed? Can I reuse my TW layout in spaces?

TiddlySpace has a simple privacy model where the tiddlers in a space can either be private or public. Private tiddlers are only visible to members of the space, public tiddlers are visible to guest users. Confusingly, TiddlySpace is built on TiddlyWeb, a Python application that provides the mechanics of a TiddlyWiki server.

You can reuse existing TW themes in TiddlySpace; using TiddlyWiki on TiddlySpace is again much the same as ordinary TiddlyWiki with the addition of a bunch of plugins.

 

(I use a modified color scheme with the left and right sidebars removed and a small topmenu, conform to and suitable for andtidwiki)

So I want to share my tiddlers; some of them can be publicly available (visible, not editable), others should only be visible to certain people. These people would be grouped in different user profiles

I estimate there could be up to 20 people to modify tiddlers. (with only a few changes per day; the tool mainly being used as a reference tool)

And for example sponsors could see more tiddlers than the general public, but neither should be able to make changes.
Overall, the content/structure would be mainly managed by just one or two people, with small contributions (only text/markup, no coding or such) from the other users
(f.e. change contact information or add a journal report)

The user group will not be very large; but It is quite diverse so I would still need a good and flexible user-management.

What would you recommend as the best way to go?
* some plugin for TW and share it on dropbox ?

There isn't a TiddlyWiki solution for Dropbox that deals with multiple simultaneous users, so I don't think this is an option at present.

 

** TW5 ?

TiddlyWiki5 isn't ready for prime time, if you have goals to accomplish now you'll be better off with classic TiddlyWiki.

 

* move the content to spaces or tiddlyweb? How does user management function here?

 

**  create my own server?
* maybe do I need to move to mediawiki or some of the other platforms with a stronger user management !?  (I would not like this option! But if needed, could you recommend any?)

I think your scenario is a good fit for TiddlySpace, and hope that Poul Staugaard will comment on GieWiki.

 

TiddlySpace is focussed on getting individual tiddlers on the web, not just TiddlyWiki documents. It encourages you to think in terms of grouping tiddlers into spaces according to the required access rights; you then add users to the spaces that they should be allowed to access the private tiddlers. There is a mechanism for including spaces in other spaces, which allows you to compose summary spaces that bring together data from multiple spaces.

Quite a common scenario is to have a separate space for each project, with the members of those spaces being the members of each project. Then one has summary spaces that pull together key project information from their separate spaces. The summary spaces would just have the coordinators as members. The summary spaces can be used to promote discoverability, bringing together disparate data so that it can be easily browsed. Meanwhile, the individual project spaces remain under the control of the project team, and they have a good deal of autonomy with regards to what information they include, as long as they publish the tiddlers that the summary space expects to be able to pull out.

Saving TW in the browser seems to be a neverending concern. Does Spaces experience similar problems?
On the other hand, could I still (how?) access a spaces implementation offline?

When used online TiddlySpace doesn't run into the file saving issues. You can take tiddlers offline in an ordinary TiddlyWiki file, work on them offline and then synchronise them back and the ordinary TiddlyWiki concerns apply with respect to saving changes.

The situation with saving changes is stabilising. We have a good story with Firefox courtesy of TiddlyFox, but still lack a good offline story for Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer.

 

Thanks in advance for any advice or helpful comments.

 

Finally, it's very interesting to hear how you're using TiddlyWiki, and getting an insight into your concerns. It's great when people share stories about using TiddlyWiki, one of the things that keeps this community together, and I'm fascinated by the myriad, shifting differences and commonalities that emerge.

Best wishes

Jeremy

 

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Jeremy Ruston
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[cdent]

On Nov 23, 12:37 pm, Jeremy Ruston <jeremy.rus...@gmail.com> wrote:
> When used online TiddlySpace doesn't run into the file saving issues. You
> can take tiddlers offline in an ordinary TiddlyWiki file, work on them
> offline and then synchronise them back and the ordinary TiddlyWiki concerns
> apply with respect to saving changes.

When I have more time I'd like to respond on some of the TiddlySpace
stuff (Jeremy's response hits the main points well), but I wanted to
respond to this point quickly:

Offline synchronization is no longer available in TiddlySpace. The
necessary code was removed from the TiddlyWiki core because in most
browsers it no longer works. Adding the code back in to TiddlySpace
doesn't help because it still doesn't work. So at the moment the
offline situation is not ideal. There's hope there will be some kind
of solution eventually.

See the following for a bit more detail:

https://github.com/TiddlySpace/tiddlyspace/issues/995
http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywikidev/browse_frm/thread/f152adeaa84d65b4
https://github.com/TiddlySpace/tiddlyspace/commit/d7fae20f973cad0125de40161d3c332308261c1e

At the moment the workaround is to:

* download the wiki to take it offline
* make and save changes as required
* go to the online wiki, use the import feature to import tiddlers
from the offline wiki

[Poul]

I would definitely argue that giewiki (as I like to write the name) could be a good fit for your needs. It has features to let you spread your content across multiple pages while still allowing full-text search, as would probably be a good idea with like 700 tiddlers to share. It also has it's own take on custom tiddler templates, and a fairly complete access control mechanism.

It is designed to be hosted on the Google App Engine and as such offers you more options for server-side extensibility than you would have by hosting your page on TiddlySpace. Compared to hosting your own TiddlyWeb server, you should also find deployment much easier.

The main drawback for some would be that giewiki is based on an older version of TW, and strictly speaking, it is a forked derivative. This may or may not be a problem to you - I would think that most of the changes I've made contribute to making it more suitable for web applications.

:-) Poul

http://giewiki.appspot.com

[Kriss]

Thank you for your answers.

I have been experimenting with your proposals and for as far as I understand it now, all options would mean I have to split the one (large) wiki containing all information into multiple documents with separated user-rights. Right?

This means I would end up with a much more complex management and loose portability in the process.

I guess I will stick with tiddlywiki for the moment.

And I will reconsider a tiddlyspace/geiwiki when I can afford to outsource the management and maintenance to a dedicated webmaster or so. 

I regret there seems to be no "simple" solution for attaching the rights directly on the tiddlers.

But as said before, thank you all very much for your input and support   !

Kris

BiPaHiMa

initiator