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bouncepaw / mycorrhiza

🍄📑 Filesystem and git-based wiki engine for the independent web written in Go and using Mycomarkup as its primary markup language.
https://mycorrhiza.wiki
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
300 stars 26 forks source link

Get rid of the sibling sidebar #132

Closed bouncepaw closed 2 years ago

bouncepaw commented 2 years ago

Sibling sidebar considered harmful. See also https://mycorrhiza.wiki/hypha/essay/on_hierarchies

The plan is:

  1. Disable it by default. Those who used it heavily before will turn it on and get a warning (☝️ using the sidebar might harm you or something like that) in stdout. They are meant to slowly learn how to live without it. Those who are new to Mycorrhiza will be fine without it. This will happen in the next release.
  2. Delete it, eventually. Not in a hurry.

A good alternative should be offered. It is totally fine without it and without alternatives (see Melanocarpa and Pescenomicon that live without them; see other wikis running other engines that work fine without it (Wikipedia might be a good example)), but here is what can be offered:

  1. A cloud of tags. Has cute vibes and encourages people to have a complex tag system, which is fine, maybe. Gotta figure out tags beforehand, see #125.
  2. User-configurable list of some hyphae that is the same everywhere. Like MediaWiki's sidebar. Something like the second row of the top bar, but vertical and more detailed. The presence of such a sidebar would make it possible to finally have a non-ugly top bar, see #78.
  3. User-configurable maps of content, as described in this outdated book. Dangerous, because it might discourage hypha linking with links. Also, how do you put it into a sidebar?
  4. List of backlinks.

Also, is it an ideology-breaking update? If yes, then it it's time for 2.0.

handlerug commented 2 years ago

I strongly suggest that wording be revised. Right now the warning sounds like a threat. Not that many people read stdout/err logs because they're usually piped to files, too, so a warning underneath the sidebar for admins might work better (if it's really needed). Something like "⚠ Sibling hyphae sidebar will be removed soon. You're strongly encouraged to migrate from hierarchy to a flat structure—consider [[tags]]." (where [[tags]] is the link to documentation or a helpful guide showing examples on how to structure a wiki using tags and links and that strange Unicode symbol is a warning sign).

As of the whole plan and alternatives, sounds reasonable to me. A cloud of tags might be overkill for the core engine because it's not the simplest layout ever. A MediaWiki-esque sidebar sounds neat and would declutter the top bar, yeah.

bouncepaw commented 2 years ago

@handlerug I like the idea of showing the warning in the UI, let's go with it.

bouncepaw commented 2 years ago

We also need the auto-renaming feature for a smoother transition to the flat structure. Currently, if I rename a hypha, all links to it break. It makes renaming hundreds of hyphae an even bigger hassle.

Implementation it is not trivial. Mycomarkup lib cannot be used for that yet. Regexes will work fine for inline links, rocket links and transclusion, but they would not work for img, they would require a special algorithm.

Should auto-renaming happen in separate edits/commits?

bouncepaw commented 2 years ago

dd3f2c698a5531f6a5566c9f4f53da64109cd8fd disabled the sidebar by default

bouncepaw commented 2 years ago

I like the idea of showing the warning in the UI, let's go with it.

It didn't happen in the end.

We also need the auto-renaming feature for a smoother transition to the flat structure. Currently, if I rename a hypha, all links to it break. It makes renaming hundreds of hyphae an even bigger hassle.

We've got redirection hyphae #152 now. Doesn't really solve the problem, but it is adjacent.

I want to get rid of the sidebar in 1.11. Or 1.12, if I am shy.

bouncepaw commented 2 years ago

Oh wait, the sidebar is no more for some time already. Closing