Suggested enhancements
Colm
structured notebook and as a collaboration tool, so I was delighted to
find a lightweight standalone tool like WikidPad. Based on my
experience so far, it looks to be both robust and useful.
I have a few suggestions that would make WikidPad even more useful for
me and I think also for many users. The first 3 are relatively
straightforward to implement (I guess 1-3 hours each; 1 & 2 could be
combined); the last one is very powerful but requires more effort:
1. When exporting a wiki tree (or the entire wiki) to a single HTML
page, the first wiki entry should be the root entry. Ideally the HTML
output would order the topics just like the Wiki tree.
Motivation: I want to use WikidPad as a notebook (for text, bookmarks,
todos,etc.) but I need to share the results with others. The HTML
export would be a great way to do this, but the first entry seems to be
arbitrary (for example, exporting the WikdPadHelp file results in a
leaf entry "Icon push" appearing as the first topic).
Related to this, it would really help if the topics could be output as
HTML heading levels (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) according to their depth in the
Wiki tree. Since not all users would want this, it would be great to
have a configuration option (checkbox: "Output HTML headings") to
control this feature.
2. I would really like the option to create a table of contents for the
HTML export.
Motivation: the WikiPad tree makes it very easy to see the entire
structure of the wiki and to navigate it; it would be very useful to
have this power within the HTML export.
In the single-page HTML export, the table of contents would appear
first.
In the multi-file HTML export, the table of contents would appear as
index.html (it would be nicer again if the user could choose the name
of the index file).
The configuration option to control this might be called something like
checkbox: "Output table of contents"
3. WikidPad entries currently preserve line-breaks entered by the user,
similar to the HTML <pre> element. This can be seen in the preview and
the HTML export.
Motivation: Wikis (and HTML) usually ignore line-breaks; you have to
either use a <br> element or enter a blank line to achieve a
line-break.
Since existing WikidPad users probably expect the current line-break
behaviour, you probably don't want to change this; however it would be
great if WikidPad had a configuration option to store line-breaks
normally but to ignore line-breaks when displaying them and in the HTML
output.
4. (significant effort) If WikidPad could import HTML documents, using
the HTML heading level to determine the depth of the WikiWord in the
tree hierarchy, and converting titles to WikiWords automatically (e.g.
"WikidPad Enhancements" would become WikidPadEnhancements), then any
existing HTML document could instantly become a WikidPad wiki.
Motivation: This would make it very easy to convince anyone to use
WikidPad since HTML is everywhere.
Note: the HTML parsing could be relatively simple:
- it could just extract the title from the <head> element and ignore
the stylesheet(s), if any
- it could just look for heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) and capture
the rest of the HTML exactly as it appears in the document
BTW, using Google Groups is a great way to engage with your user
community, but have you thought about using a free Wiki like
WikiSpaces? This would enable you to publish your todos and would let
your user base comment or vote on any feature suggestions (like the
ones above).
Last but not least, *thank you* for an attractive and truly useful
product, and I hope that you continue to have the time and energy to
keep enhancing it for your many users.