Separation can be a very good thing.

[Sticky Notes]

The more I see and hear about TW5 the more I think it's too different and targeted at a very different crowd than TWC, and honestly I think it's starting to get a little confusing around here with some topics, and will get worse in the future because the two systems share virtually nothing in common. (It feels kind of like if you had a group that centered around Node.js and Apache at the same time, sure they have some similarities, but really wouldn't want the commonalities for them to be mixed together.)

People coming to this group expecting to find help on TW5 and doing searches are going to find tons of TWC topics that are going to be useless to them, and people like me who plan on staying with TWC for many more years (If I ever abandon it) come here to see what's happening in the TWC world and get help for it which the bizarre mixing of TW5 makes more unpleasant than it should be which will only get worse in the future or even now the topics between the two are getting a bit muddled up.

I would like to propose that the admin and developers for TW5 create a new group for as it is the most practical solution before things really start getting out of hand.

For my defense on why I think TW5 should be branched off of the group and not TWC is simple this group is filled with years of very helpful TWC backlog posts and moving it to a new group would than cause us to loss all of that.

[PMario]

+1 to: Separation can be a very good thing.

------------------------

There are 5 TW related groups that I know of, and 4 of them I do follow. I'm not really happy, to follow one more :( So I'd suggest to create a new "structure" (see the end of the post)

a) TiddlyWiki ... has >4800 members
b) TiddlySpace ... 96 members

c) TiddlyWikiDev ... >1400 members
d) TiddlyWeb ... 191 members

e) Tiddlywiki-GTD ... 30 members

IMO TiddlyWiki group was meant to be for "user" questions, related to TiddlyWiki  ... now more often named TWc for TiddlyWiki-classic
If you have a look at the google hangout videos [1], you'll see/here that we need to use TWc as a new term to differentiate between TWc and TW5.

Jeremy clearly stated several times, that he want's TW5, to become TiddlyWiki.
@Jeremy, may be it's the right time _now_

For me TWc is easy to use as an alias for TiddlyWiki-classic and TWc imo is a better name than TW2.

TW5 is now close to beta and it seems to attract new users. For them TW5 is TiddlyWiki. Having a look at the questions posted lately, it's getting confusing (as Sticky Note stated), also for those who wants to answer, since the first question is "Do you ask about TWc or TW5?" .....

So I suggest:

1) Rename the TiddlyWiki group to TiddlyWiki-classic --NOW--
 - So it can keep it's history and all its members.
 - Create a small intro text, that tells new users that "this group is about TiddlyWiki-classic"
 - Tell the visitor, that there is a TiddlyWiki group, that is about TW5
 - Tranfer all posts related to TW5 from TWc group to TW group

2) Create a TW5 group that is named TiddlyWiki
 - There should be a hint, that links to the TWc group :) ...

3) Create some intro text for TiddlyWikiDev, TiddlyWeb that tells the user what to expect / post there.
 - TiddlySpace has some info, but I think there should be links to the other  Tiddly* groups too.

Every Group should link to any other group in the "Intro section"

just my 2cents
have fun!
mario

[1] http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tiddlywiki+hangout

[Julio]

Hello all,

Although I do more lurking than posting:

I'll also give a +1 to: Separation can be a very good thing.

Agreed with all of the above said.

Best regards,

Julio

[Arc Acorn]

I'd like to +1 the idea as well.

Though I do wonder given how different TW5 is from TWc if really it wouldn't be better to rename it. (It is after all still early on in it's development and many programs start out with code names and than move on to their real names when they leave the early stages and start coming into their own.)

I see PMario's points, though at the same time I find myself wondering why something that is really not an upgrade nor replacement to it's predecessor is carrying on it's name. Just from the people I know in the real world who don't track this group but use TWc due to me giving them copies, when I first bring up TW5 I'm often meet with a lot of excitement because they think "TidilyWiki" the program they knew and love is getting a major update, and than as they learn more about and get a chance to use it they get rather depressed since for many of them the foreseeable TW5 won't be able to replace TWc for a long time, if ever.

With that I think having such different programs with the same name is hurting the brand and may even be hurting TW5 itself as people go into it with expectations that are not going to be meet. To give an analogy I'd say it's like walking into a brand new department store building expecting a department store and instead you find yourself in a grocery store. Which to me seems like a bad thing in a lot of ways because in my experience people than get depressed or some even feel betrayed that it's not what they thought or was lead to believe it was and than simply walk away with no intention of ever giving it a chance. Whereas if it was something entirely new they would be more willing to look at it as something new and think of ways to use it rather than disregarding it as false advertising. 

Anyway that's just me 2¢ which in the modern day you can't even buy a gumball for that so it can't be worth much. XD

[Jeremy Ruston]

So maybe I should just stop working on TW5 if it's not what people want?

Best wishes

Jeremy

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[Arc Acorn]

That's not really what I meant ^-^;

Sure I'll admit TW5 is rather iffy to me since it just isn't something I personally see myself using, but me and the people I know are just a small number of use cases we are after all writers and system IT types who really like how easy it is to get TWc looking and feeling just how we want it and adding new things very easily, even doing core modification right in a text editor when needed and being able to pass things around between us physically. We really use them as highly personalized notebooks and personal databases.

One way of putting it is that I personally feel that TW5 is targeted at either being a very basic setup ready out of the box or straight to rather high level power users.

Where as TWc has many things that makes it ideal for the middle ground people and early power users and is a lot of fun for us to play around with and make our own.

Straight out of the box TWc is a pretty blank slate to be played with and it is easy to tweak and turn into nearly anything you need, which can make it hard for really early users who don't know HTML/CSS and basic JavaScript but once you learn a little of them you can do really awesome things. I've even used it as a tool to teach a couple of young kids the basics of HTML/CSS and what I know about JavaScript since its a wonderful playground for teaching things. 

Where as TW5 is once again just entirely different it's not as "fun" for early and middle level people to tinker with IMO of course.

In the end:

TWc seems like the ultimate notebook! and personal Swiss army knife.

TW5 seems like an IT's tool.

So really I'm not saying people don't want it, nor am I saying it's not worth building, I was just saying that in my experiences that they seem like such different programs that keeping them named so closely seems kind of dangerous and a tad miss-leading, which could lead to a good deal of unneeded confusion for the lighter users along with hurting TWc in terms of new users coming in as they will inherently be drawn to TW5 because of it's name and potently miss out on finding a great gem in the history of personal wikis.  

[Julio]

Hello Jeremy and all,

Oh please don't stop working on TW5!

However, when I agreed with what was said above I agreed more for referencing's sake.

I'm sure once TW5 matures a tad more I will eventually migrate all of my stuff to it.

For the time being I'm following the Hangouts and discussions religiously eventhough much goes over my head at times. :)

Like Mario said above...sometimes it can get very confusing when tracking a TW5 vs a TWC issue.

On the other hand, if creating a separate group for TW5 users seems like too much to do, one can start a discussion with the prefix "TW5: my topic" or "TWC: my topic" for better referencing on following the topics at hand or doing searches. Would that make sense?

Just some ideas to throw into the hat,

Julio

[Sticky Notes]

I can't really say I'm sold on the idea of just adding TW5 or TWC/2 to the topic name as it feels like we are only treating one aspect of a much larger issue.

Just a single example is as the group grows even if you have the prefixes for TW5 for people searching for TWC/2 info they will evidently be searching and having to scroll though who knows how many dozens of pages of TW5 entries to find what they are looking for, and new users starting on TW5 will have issues when they hit the thousands of search results with no prefixes at all, to say nothing about the confusion that could happen for anyone coming from a Google/Bing/web search who has never set foot on the front page of the group before.

It would be nice if Google groups worked more like a normal BBS and we could just have sections for each but in reality a Google group is like a section in a big BBS and so it seems like we are just heading to a bad place keeping them combined given how different they are.

+0.5 to the name argument though, well I would agree that really the current TW2/Classic & TW5 names seem rather miss-leading, at the same point developers have the right to name their creations any things they want.

[PMario]

On Monday, September 2, 2013 8:20:14 PM UTC+2, Arc Acorn wrote:

Though I do wonder given how different TW5 is from TWc if really it wouldn't be better to rename it. (It is after all still early on in it's development and many programs start out with code names and than move on to their real names when they leave the early stages and start coming into their own.)

That's what I suggested, just the other way around. What we all know and love, was released in 2004 and the first version, didn't have the look an feel tiddlywiki.com has now.

I think there is no problem in calling it TiddlyWiki-classic / TWc. It won't hurt anybody, since the functionality is the same :)
 

<snip> ...  though at the same time I find myself wondering why something that is really not an upgrade nor replacement to it's predecessor is carrying on it's name.

... hard words, that imo are not true.
* The basic concept of TW is, that it is a self contained wiki.
* The smallest unit in this wiki are tiddlers.
* The big strength of TW is transclusions.
...

All those points and several more, are still true for TW5. Just TWc has some major shortcommings.

* Search engines can't handle its output.
* Design decisions (in code and CSS) made in 2004, just don't fit the modern web anymore.
* Since version 2.6.6 we are only dealing with problems caused by increaded browser security restrictions. ...

TW5 fixes those problems (I just pointed out 3 of them to keep the answer short ;).

With tw5 you are able to create a static representation of your TW [1]. At the moment it uses the same CSS as the TW5 app but it is possible to change that. Search engines will be happy with this type of content. You can put the static representation on a stick and you have a "read only" version ...

TW5 is HTML5 ready. We will be able to use all the new stuff, that is coming up in new browsers ...

TW5 by design let's us handle single tiddlers as single files. I know a ton of topics here in the group that complain about the limits TWc has.

Just from the people I know in the real world who don't track this group but use TWc due to me giving them copies, when I first bring up TW5 I'm often meet with a lot of excitement because they think "TidilyWiki" the program they knew and love is getting a major update, and than as they learn more about and get a chance to use it they get rather depressed since for many of them the foreseeable TW5 won't be able to replace TWc for a long time, if ever.

I'm pretty sure TW5 can replace many TW2 installations out of the box. Just it doesn't need that many 3rd party plugins, because the core is able to handle much more requirements.

TW5 looks different, that's true. We are not used to the new design, but the possibilities to tweak it will be much more userfriendly, than it was with TWc. There will be no need to mess around with *Templates to adjust theme settings. [2]

What's missing in the alpha is more "user ready" documentation. But imo everyone is free to give feedback, so shortcommings can be fixed.

Without feedback -> no improvement ;)

have fun!

[1] http://five.tiddlywiki.com/static/HelloThere
[2] Open tab: More: Shadows: $ControlPanel  and edit the text fields ...

[Julio]

Yes agreed about the normal BBS bit Sticky Notes, it's unfortunate Google hasn't implemented any "sub group" feature as it would be ideal.

Well..back to lurking...and learning!

Best regards,

Julio

[Arc Acorn]

I'm not really into having massively long debates which is why I usually stay out of feedback related things.

Though I will argue a few points: 

My main argument is:

TW5 is up and coming and new so why would you change the name of an old program/project so a new one can have the old ones name?

TW5 =  HTML5+Node.js based tiddler driven Wiki (A completely new code base and system from the ground up)

 

Where as it's name when read by anyone new or who hasn't been around for while sounds like TiddlyWiki 5 (Which in nearly everyone I have ever told about it who doesn't keep track of things automatically thinks "awesome! new major version of TiddlyWiki... Though I don't remember versions 3 and 4... I most have missed them.")

* Search engines can't handle its output.
* Design decisions (in code and CSS) made in 2004, just don't fit the modern web anymore. 
* Since version 2.6.6 we are only dealing with problems caused by increaded browser security restrictions.

These are all valid points however let me ask this, what dose TW5 do for the large number of people who don't care about their TWs being on the web or editing them online? 

Many of the people I have seen attracted to TW are attracted to it because it can be used entirely offline and doesn't require any special hosting software to use it at its fullest (Cough Node.js) like other wikis, but still lets you heavily customize the interface and core unlike other options such as WikiPad or The Red Notebook If you use TWc with portable Firefox you can take it with you anywhere and use it on nearly any windows system without having to do anything else just as if it was any other portable no nonsense program. 

"* The basic concept of TW is, that it is a self contained wiki."

To me TW5 is not self contained as most of it's best features require Node.js and well you can easily carry around a static version and give it out it is not easy at all to give people a full copy of your original full featured when it's a node.js app, especially if they are none techy people.

TW5 is at it's core a Node.js app that can be used as a self contained wiki, it is not at it's core a fully self contained system in the way that TWc is.

(I will admit modern web browsers have made it less fully self contained and ultra portable but it can still largely be used in the same ways.)

"* The smallest unit in this wiki are tiddlers"

I feel weird nit picking this but it doesn't sound quite right... As it doesn't seem technically true for either TWc nor TW5 as you said yourself you can transclud blocks and slices of things though out the wiki which would make blocks and slices the smallest unit of the wiki. (Not that I'm saying they are not both tiddler driven but if we are going to diverge into technicalities...)  

"* The big strength of TW is transclusions"

This is subjective, for most the people I know in person the big strength to TW is easily being able to customize the templates, and the ease and simplicity of the plugin system. (In what other wiki can you copy and past a plug-in into a page tag it system-config and have it work? Let alone even be able to modify core functionality.)

TW5 is nightmarish to do extensive visual modifications to compared to the power and simplicity of the template systems in TWc especially when you start using the various plugins that allow for different view and edit mode templates to be used on things based on tag or field data.

"I'm pretty sure TW5 can replace many TW2 installations out of the box. Just it doesn't need that many 3rd party plugins, because the core is able to handle much more requirements."

I'm pretty sure DokuWiki can replace just as many TW2 "installations" as well, I however don't think we should marge the two programs by name and community because they may be able to be used to replace one another in some use cases.

Like any complex/active program it is possible that TW5 will one day become a real replacement in every possible way for TWc but it is also just as likely that it will go down an entirely different path as development goes on and never be a replacement for TWc for many people.

At the end of the post all I am saying, is to save a lot of confusion for no real reason it would make sense to give a new program based on a completely new code base and largely new features and syntax a new name, rather than giving it an old still very useful programs (that is not really being replaced) name.

"Just because someone buys a new kitten doesn't mean they should rename the old pussy cat just so the kitten can have the more popular name."

[David Gifford]

I am going to step into this one with my two cents worth:

There seems to be a lot of confusion on the part of some that feel TW5 is only good for node.js. That is simply not true.

I am a non/developer who does not use node.js or work with online TWs. I use standalone TWs offline and upload them to my website with FileZilla. Yet even I have gotten to the point of using TW5 as my to do list - a major improvement to my TW classic to do list, I should say, and as my note-taking tool (see here http://giffmex.org/5notes.htm for the last version I bothered to upload), and now to publish my Spanish web materials (http://www.giffmex.org/recursosgiffmex.htm).

The only feature I am really eager for is the ability to get URLS from tiddlers, to promote my Spanish materials. Everything else is pretty much the way I want it. Yes, it will be a while to get plugins and bells and whistles that would be cool to have. But it is amazing what is already available, especially just in the last 2 or 3 months. Even in terms of visual modifications, there is already the stylesheet option and now the Theme tweaks tiddler. And I have already seen and used a Topmenu and a special viewtemplate. I can tell it's really not far away before TW5 starts exploding with plugins and features.

So the complaints don't resonate with me, and made me wince. Can't blame Jeremy if he felt like his work is unwanted after a couple of the comments here.

I have used several programs that have come out with radically different versions and have retained the name of the old version. There are people stll using version 2 of Logos software when it is on version 5, and every version of Logos was practically a reinvention of the software. TiddlyWiki is no different and TW5 has every right to take over the TW name.

I can sympathize with those who would like to have the long history of discussions and threads in the present Google group available to them in a classic-related group and not have to wade through TW5 posts. So if there is a way to rename the thread TiddlyWiki classic and give the TiddlyWiki group name to TW5, I would be in favor of that option. And I think that change should come sooner rather than later. And each group should link to the other.

But one thing is to ask for changes in the group and another is to complain about the uselessness of software you don't even seem to understand.

[Sticky Notes]

This topic is getting a bit blown off topic and not quite what I was going for when I made the post, but I don't think anyone here has actually "complained about the uselessness of software" per-se.

Arc may sound a bit overly invested with TWC and harsh on TW5 but really it sounds most like his main complaint/passion/concern in his argument comes from the fact that he really loves TWC and doesn't want to see people pass it over as old junk-ware just because there is something with a "newer sounding name".

I don't know what "Logos" is and there seems to be quite a few things with it's name, but I do know a little project called Drupal that tends to go though pretty major changes on it's major versions numbers. Though at that point the Drupal community is based around this knowledge and there website and resources make it very easy to find information and resources for each major versions.

I'd like to stop a moment and say again I'm not on Arc's side I think Developers can name there stuff anything they want and manage them any way they feel like.

But I can see his point in that TidilyWiki as a whole dose not have a well known history for this kind of thing and the resources and help that can be found are very fragmented all around the internet, unlike say Drupal's content which tends to be very well managed and it's very rare that you find yourself looking at info for Version 5 when you where looking for help on Version 6, 7, 8 or even 4 for that matter because for a very long time in the community everybody has known it changes a lot between each version number and it's important to keep things well organized.

Digressing a tad once again looking at Drupal (Which I spend a lot of time with and why I'm using it as my example.) Each major version of Drupal is made to replace the last, it doesn't mean you HAVE to upgrade but the target is to make a system that each time it's better at doing the same things as the old one it doesn't change a lot of things very often that makes it hard to migrate (Unless you have a very complex site/application built around it) nor dose it changes it in ways that break every single plug-in most just need some tweaking to work with the new calls and framework where as TW5 doesn't really seem to be the same way... It seems to be built very differently and has had a lot of things done that could easily make migration harder than it could be.

Unless you have a fairly simple setup It kind of looks like you have to reinvent your entire setup when moving to TW5.

I haven't played with it much but when I did it didn't seem like you could easily transfer your style-sheets, your templates, your custom fields, your transclusions, or even much of your inline styling such as {Classname{{Stuff}}} ...etc very well. TW5 really dose feel more like a complete reinventionment rather than an update to make it more modern.

Again that being said I'm not siding with anything I'm just trying to give perceptive on why, it may be rubbing some people in the wrong way, and hoping to providing a more 3rd person look at what is probably a more "passionate" retort than it needed to be in order to avoid any unneeded drama because of my post. 

Of course that being said I think the developers of TWC should be proud that they have made such an amazing piece of code that they have fans who are willing to come to bat for it and say that it's going to be really hard to ever replace, it's really quite a big complement more than anything.

[Jonas Susara]

Greetings, fellow TW fans!

TiddlyWikiFive is natural part of the development/growth/progress of the software. To me, TiddlyWiki is my killer organizer app - its *vital* it continues.

IMHO, A separate users group for TiddlyWikiClassic and TiddlyWikiFive is a good idea.

Thanks!

--fudgebob

[David Johnston]

It is amazing how a single knee-jerk response to change can derail significant development effort.

Change happens constantly, the early edge of change seems technical and often confusing to people because it has not been refined and they are not comfortable with it yet. TiddlyWiki 5 is at that stage right now, it feels like more effort to use, while TWc feels like less effort. However, with refinement and development TW5 will be more capable and easier to use than TWc and built upon a much better structure, which will enable it to take advantage of modern browsers into the future. Whereas TWc will over time become less and less able to perform effectively, it will require more and more patching/development effort to keep it limping forward because the structure it is based upon will be out of date compared to the browser(s) you will view it in.

My advice as a programmer would be to support the development of TW5 as much as possible, I feel it is aiming at the correct mix of technologies to ensure survival in the future. Jeremy is doing an excellent job from what I can see of the code and with support and encouragement will deliver a product which will supersede the achievements of its predecessor.  

[David Gifford]

Thanks, Sticky Notes, for your balanced and gentle reply. Very helpful comments. Just to clarify and also to try to soften the blow of my earlier comment, I hope my comment about "complaining about the uselessness of software" didn't rub anyone the wrong way. It wasn't meant to, though reading it now, I can see why it might. I was just grasping for the right words to use. It seemed to me that people were using harsh language to express that they had no intention of using TW5, but their criticism of 5 seemed to rest on the fact that it is built for node.js, when it works just fine as a standalone just as TWc does. I meant useless in the sense of that it didn't meet their needs, that it was useless to them. And I don't think that is true. I think David Johnston's comment is more to the point, that it currently takes more effort, so it feels like too much work, but later, keeping TWc going will be what takes more effort. Blessings to all. My comments last night were meant to be a gentle correction and an encouragement, with actual examples of what can already be done, but if they came across as anything else, I am sorry about that.

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[G.J.Robert]

I suggest that in this thread we can discuss less "how one thinks about TWc/TW5" and back to "should this discussion group have a branch so to distinguish topics about the two major works", and "if yes, how to separate" or "if no, how to make most of the members of this group comfortable with different objectives on the group"?

(For me TWc may stay in use for a long time on since I have 20~25MB total of TW files/spaces with heavily working plugins which may never be able to be transferred upon TW5 cores. However, I do appreciate the fascinating and promising bunch of new features TW5 is providing and I also believe that as TW5 reaches closer and closer to its first release, more developments and contributions may also expand its usage, use cases and functions, to what TWc has got in the years and even makes TiddlyWiki more popular. I look forward to this happening soon.)

It may be clear to visitors with two dedicated groups for each, and the proposal of PMario sounds good to me: rename this group to TW-classic or such, and create a new one as "TiddlyWiki" hosting things about TW5. Meanwhile I just came up with one technical issue: the URL of the group and threads. Since "tiddlywiki" is the suffix for this group, will it change with the name of the group? If not, then will it be confusing to visitors with this mismatch? But on the other hand, if the URLs do change, will the current links of posts and threads broken? I hope that it's just my over-worrying and there is in fact no such a problem.

I'm also okay with the current state with TWc and TW5 together If we decide to keep it as is. If there are members confused with the two major forks then we notice them, help them and make clear how to find needed information respectively. I hope and support that both TW5 and TWc continue to get development and support as both are and will be really helpful in my digital life. Thanks a lot, people!

Cheers
GJRobert

Sticky Notes於 2013年9月2日星期一UTC+8下午2時49分43秒寫道：

[Jeremy Ruston]

I'm grateful to everybody for taking part in this discussion. It's very helpful to bring things to the surface, and I'm tremendously appreciative that there is interest in my activities.

The original question was about splitting this group, and the rationale included some comments about the relationship between TWc and TW5 that are worth responding to in some detail before turning to the original question.

The first thing to note is that TiddlyWiki classic has been slowly dying since BT acquired Osmosoft in 2007. Here's the Google Trends graph of search volumes, usually a pretty good metric of interest:

http://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore?q=tiddlywiki#q=tiddlywiki&cmpt=q

That's the time frame that Osmosoft invested significant effort in the TiddlyWiki universe. It has enjoyed the attention of a devoted but dwindling core of end users, but it hasn't been enough to stem the decline.

Against that background of dwindling interest, one might ask why I'm investing my own time and energy of working on a new version at all. Fundamentally, the reason is that I think that the success of TW classic thoroughly validates the idea of a single file wiki but that the execution was too flawed to sustain the attention it deserves - particularly the attention of developers.

I have personal experience of this issue while I was running Osmosoft inside BT: there was little enthusiasm from many of the developers to work on the TiddlyWiki core code.  Coming from a conventional development background, TWc is a very strange beast. I wrote most of it while I was learning JavaScript and HTML, and at a time when TiddlyWiki was blazing a trail, pushing browsers beyond their commonly understood constraints. There was no jQuery and so a lot of my effort on TWc was just to get the code working consistently across a range of browsers.

At Osmosoft we successfully developed TiddlyWeb, a clean, well engineered, production quality serverside for TiddlyWiki. But we struggled to get the TiddlyWiki side doing everything that we wanted. We were working against assumptions made in the core code, and in the flock of popular plugins. Over the years I think Osmosoft did a pretty good job on the suite, but even today there are some troubling limitations - for example, TiddlyWiki under TiddlySpace can't dynamically reflect the changes made by other users to the same space.

Other technical limitations of TiddlyWiki have dogged it from the start: for example, there is still not a good experience for search engines to index TiddlyWiki. Not everybody cares about such capabilities, but those that do have little choice but to abandon TiddlyWiki.

So, for a while, TiddlyWiki has been an unfriendly environment for developers, but with lots of limitations that really need developer effort to overcome.

Turning now to end users, with open source software a good rule of thumb is that the more users a piece of software has, the more useful it becomes. Accordingly, I believe that the best way to assure TiddlyWiki's future is to try to make it much more popular than before. I bandy around the figure of making it 100 times as popular.

I believe that we can make it that popular by making it easy to learn and easy to use, and ensuring that the underpinnings are flexible enough to cope with whatever the future throws at us. As I said before, the basic proposition of TiddlyWiki has always seemed to go over quite well with prospective users. This time around I think we can do a much better job of explaining it to new people.

If we achieve this increase in popularity, then the community of incoming TW5 users will rapidly outnumber our core community of TWc users. Therefore, I believe that we should optimise the experience of discovering TiddlyWiki for new TW5 users, and we need to do that now.

In my opinion, TiddlyWiki5 and TiddlyWiki Classic are different versions of exactly the same product, with the same goals and the same basic design. There are incompatibilities in the way that they are customised and extended, but the elevator pitch is precisely the same: a JavaScript wiki that works from a single HTML file. TW5 

The changes in TW5 are resolutely intended to benefit end users. For example, the new plugin architecture makes it possible to drag-and-drop plugins between wikis, not just cut and paste them. And now a plugin can contain a bundle of related tiddlers (which is handy for developers) while still being a single unit for end users.

As I've shown above, underpinning those improvements with a good developer experience is important for end users because without a stream of developers interested in working on TiddlyWiki and it's plugins we wouldn't have the rich world of extensions and adaptations that makes TiddlyWiki so useful in so many different niches.

There a few misunderstandings in the thread that suggest that I need to do a better job of explaining TW5. For instance, the idea that the presence of the node.js edition of TW5 might somehow compromise/diminish/complicate the single file edition. The truth is that TiddlyWiki has since 2006/7 had a complete set of command line tools to enable the developers to work on the core. They were kind of klunky weird things written in Ruby, with a high learning curve. All that's happened in TW5 is that that job of building a single file wiki from it's constituent parts is undertaken by TiddlyWiki itself. This makes the tiddlyverse easier to use and easier to understand.

Finally, turning to the original question about splitting the Google groups, I have a couple of observations:

* Experience suggests that people find it hard to figure out which Tiddly* group they should address with a particular post. There are already too many groups

* The TiddlyWiki group is pretty low traffic; compare it with something like the node.js google group: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!aboutgroup/nodejs

* I don't think we can rename the existing group without messing up links to it

* Based on past behaviour, Google is probably going to kill Google Groups as soon as they decently can

So, my response to the original suggestion is:

1) We should add a welcome message to the TW groups asking people to flag their subject lines TWc or TW5 (I've actually already done this)

2) We plan a migration away from Google Groups:

a) TiddlyWikiDev could migrate to StackOverflow; several other open source projects use it in that way

b) The main TiddlyWiki group could migrate to a homegrown TiddlyWeb+TiddlyWiki5 host

I haven't had time to address all the points raised in the thread, do please fire away with any questions or clarifications.

Best wishes

Jeremy

 

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[Joshua]

I think Jeremy's plans are sound and would be happy to follow his suggestions.

Joshua

[Arc Acorn]

2) We plan a migration away from Google Groups:

a) TiddlyWikiDev could migrate to StackOverflow; several other open source projects use it in that way

b) The main TiddlyWiki group could migrate to a homegrown TiddlyWeb+TiddlyWiki5 host

 I would like to vote for a move to a normal forum or BBS system.

The more I think about it the more sense it makes for a project like TWC/5 to be on a real forum.

#1 You can easily segregated Classic and Five 

#2 We would finally have a central place to share things like themes, plugins, scripts...etc that any one could add to.

#3 We can Pin topics in different threads, we get a ton of repeat support questions here that could be fixed very easily in a forum.

#4 If cost or ease of sign-up is the real issue we don't their are free-ad support BBSs out there and many of them any nearly everyone of the self hosted ones support Google, Facebook, Twitter, (Other open sign in accounts) to be used. 

#5 It would be quick and easy to setup compared to any of the other options and is really a standard for projects/communities of this type.

#6 All the current Goolge groups could be merged into a single forum under Dev, Community, Variants like GTD..etc everything in one place!

[Eskha]

Hi,

For a short term solution, I agree with Jeremy about a welcome message to the TW groups asking people to flag their subject lines TWc or TW5, due to the not so big traffic in this group.

For a long term solution, I would rather have a central place for TWc and TW5 open to contributions from TW users and containing :
* A presentation of TWc and TW5,
* A download area,
* Documentation about TWs,
* A forum, a FAQ, tutorials,
* A plugin and theme repository with their documentation,
* A presentation and links to TW universe (TiddlyWeb, TiddlySpot, Tiddly GTD ...).

About TWc / TW5
I think that TWc will still survive for quite a long time because:
* Of all the already existing plugins,
* Of all the customization (plugins, themes/css, transclusions, ...) made by each user on its TW.
* Of the impossibility to simply and quickly import this plugins and customizations inside a TW5.

On the other side, TW5 seems to have more potential, especially for developing / integrating new functionalities. And I think, exiting and new users will use it:
* If he can add useful functionalities (this implies developing plugins but also making them easy to find and use),
* If he can easily tweak its TW5. For me, when I dscovered TWc, I decided to use it against other solutions because it was a single thml page, you could use anywhere (including PC with limited accounts) and offering powerful tools and quite easy tweaking mechanisms.

I'd like to find this power and simplicity again in TW5.
For instance it took me 10-20 mn in TWc to understand plugin mechanism, make a first hello-world plugin and hack my first plugin without using anything else than my TWc and my browser. To do a simple helloWorld plugin in TW5, the recommended way*, you should:
1) download a node.js binaries version (can't use the installer version on a work computer),
2) discover how to make a plugin and build a TW including it with node.js,
3) find and download a git portable version to use the building .sh script (windows 7 computer ),
4) searching on internet how to properly configure node.js and git portable in this portable configuration => writing the corresponding .bat files.
5) Finally having your plugin in your TW!
While this may be easy for (javascript) developers it may not be so easy for common users.

However I have no doubt that Jeremy will find solutions to allow easy tweaking of TW5 for common users and that he just need time (I can't imagine how many hours he has already spent on TW5 and will spend  to make a beta and the next versions) and some feedback to do so (it's always difficult and time consumming to make simple functions).

Thank you for those reading up to this point.

Eskha

[Arc Acorn]

This seems like an appropriate place to say this:

Can we please at least get something on TW5 that clearly states upfront that it is not backward comparable with virtually anything made for TWc?

As more and more people use it and start looking to do things they are going to wander by tons of TWc stuff and those less techy one's will likely find it very frustrating that they can't figure out why things don't work. 

That way if we are really going to keep things in the state they are we can clear up at least some headache for new users by at the very least making it very clear that things made in the past for "TiddlyWiki" are incompatible and than be very vigilant about making sure anything that is compatible for TW5 is clearly marked so that new people know that if they don't see "Only for use with TW5, For use with...etc" that it is TWc related and has a very low likelihood of being relevant to TW5.