Hi Mat,
thank you very much for your feedback, you raise some important points
and a new Tinka version with quite a few changes is already in the making.
Here are my thoughts:
* I don't think the "Create New Plugin" button/content should be
under the tab "Installed Plugins" but instead warrants a tab
of its own.
Yes, you are correct, it feels better to put it there, so this will be
changed in the next version.
* As someone new in the plugin packers business, I am a bit
uncertain what happens to my original tiddlers. It seems they
are fully replaced with the created plugin. This makes it
difficult to make changes and I would strongly prefer that the
original tiddlers were left intact.
* *Presumption* of how a plugin is made up and how Tinka creates
one: the plugin is created by copying+converting multiple tiddlers
into a json tiddler. At the same time, the original tiddlers are
converted into being shadow tiddlers.
*Feedback*: In creating different /variants /of a plugin, which
I'm just trying to do, I find it would be valuable to access
tiddlers that have previously been converted to shadow tiddlers.
(Specifically, I'm creating a variant of the SideEditor and it
uses all the tiddlers of the current variant but also some new
ones.) If possible, I would like an *option to include shadow
tiddlers* in the Tinka search tool. (...or is a tiddler somehow
critically changed as it is converted into a shadow tiddler,
making it unusable for plugin content?)
*Observation*: When developing my plugin, I need easy access to the
tiddlers involved so they are not prefixed with $:/. This, however,
means that when the plugin is created, they are hidded (shadowed) but
with these titles... which makes them "odd" in the shadow list and,
more unfortunate, they get placed (alphasorted) to the very bottom of
the listing. If someone is looking around for where these tiddlers are
hiding, then being at the very bottom of a long list is of course not
good.
*Feedback*: I'm not certain it's a "Tinka issue" as much as a workflow
issue, but I would like to use common titles during development but
have *prefixes $:/ added* as they are converted into shadow tiddlers.
Maybe this is something Tinka could offer?
This is partly due to the way plugins work, namely the tiddlers
belonging to this plugin are stuffed into a JSON tiddler and become
shadows. Also I am afraid that I would like to do it this way, as
ideally the tiddlers in the plugin are the ones that get executed on
loading, as this is necessary to test if the plugin is working. Copying
those tiddlers and having them both as shadows and as normal tiddlers
may cause all kinds of problems.
The general philosophy is that all the tiddlers belonging to the plugin
should be shadow tiddlers, except when you are in the middle of making
changes, in which case a selected few are overwritten by normal
tiddlers. Also, you can get a list of all the tiddlers in the plugin by
just clicking on the plugin name in either the Tinka tab or the normal
Plugin tab in the Control Panel.
I do however agree with you, that it can be cumbersome to navigate to
the tiddlers. For that, I would like to add something like an edit-mode,
where a new tab is attached to the sidebar that displays all the
relevant tiddlers for the plugin for easy access.
The variants is something I did not think about when I removed the
capability of the "default" search to search for shadows. I will have to
think about this one and maybe add a third tab to the searches that
enable a search for shadow tiddlers. For now however, the mechanics to
create variants is via the backup functionality:
- You create your plugin
- Then you back it up
- Make the changes to create a new variant
- Pack the changes into the plugin, maybe add something to the version
to mark is as a variant (e.g. "0.0.2-variantA")
- Repeat for all the variants. If you want to make one active again,
simply restore it via the Backup-tab, the currently active one will be
backed up by default (if not already)
This way you will also only have 1 variant active at any given time
(which sounds like a good idea).
As for the creation ($:/-prefix) process: Since plugin tiddlers can have
interdependencies (and these are usually by title), it can get very
difficult to near impossible to implement a mechanic that changes the
tiddlers titles automatically while keeping all the links intact.
Therefore, when making a plugin, the tiddler titles pretty much have to
be the final titles. Again the above mentioned "edit-mode" with the
sidebar tab might make this process easier.
* "/Plugin title/" appeared clear... until I read /(full
"path")/. I suggest using the same technique used in the
standard "New Tiddler", i.e add a faint gray
"disappear-on-type" instruction in the text field saying
perhaps "/e.g $:/.../myPlugin/". (...if this, in deed, is what
you mean).
You are right, this might be confusing, I will write a simple helpfile
that explains all of the metadata field involved to make this more
clear. Also, "Plugin title" might change to "Plugin path" or maybe
"Plugin tiddler" as it really doesn't have much to do with the title of
the plugin that the user perceives.
* ...further, I propose moving "/Name:/" to first position in
list, then "/Plugin title/" and then "/Author/".
This field only applies for theme plugins, it does not have any effects
on the name of the plugin for normal plugins (if I am not mistaken).
Again, this has to be made clear somehow, I am not sure how exactly
though, as I would like to keep all possible metadata fields displayed
at any time, even though some of them might not apply to the specific
type of plugin currently being edited.
* For "/Plugin type/" I would love to get a drop down menu with
predefined suggestions in addition to the possibility to make
up a type. I propose "predefined suggestions" as part of a
greater "community issue" to standardize denominations and
terminology for the coming Federation. I'm guessing this will
become important then in order to find things (or am I wrong?)
Your whole plugin packer already does a wonderful job for
creating a standard for the meta data labels (e.g "Author" as
opposed to "Creator", "Plugin-maker" etc), not to mention the
fact that your plugin encourages people to actually add this
data to begin with.
I fully agree, I will change this for the next version.
* "Description"; It is not unlikely that the plugin author finds
the plugin to be more "obvious" than the later users. For this
reason it is, IMO, desirable to really encourage the author to
describe it properly, and the current field is IMO too small
for this. (An option would perhaps be a field with "/Link to
documentation/" or some such.)
Although this encourages to type in a longer text, this is actually the
"name" of the plugin that will be displayed in the plugin tab. Therefore
this isn't much of a description, but more of a descriptive title. I am
not sure why TiddlyWiki does it this way (instead of using the "name"
field), but that is how it works as far as I can tell (very confusing, I
know).
Making it double the current length is probably still a good idea though.
* "Version"; do I understand it right that typing in "1" or
"0.1" should automatically be converted to "0.01"? (I made my
first plugin the other day and proudly tried to set it to
version 1.0 but this was converted. Maybe there are standards
for versioning that I'm not aware of?)
TiddlyWiki seems to only accept version-numbers in this format:
N.N.N-XXXXX where N is a number and X can be letters (and maybe numbers
too). therefore 1 is automatically converted to "0.0.1". "1.0.0" would
work the way you would expect. Again, this probably has to be explained
(and I will include this in the help-tiddler).
I apologize that this answer became very lengthy, still I hope I was
able shed some light on a few things. Again thank you very much for your
feedback, I will be sure to include the points you mentioned in the next
Tinka version.
/Andreas
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