Ideator, project idea planning web-app at neologue.co.uk

Overview

The basic "outliner" functionality (an outliner has essentially a tree structure of notes and such text data) works already, you can browse the hierarchy of notes, add new notes and edit existing ones.

Version Notes!

• Last worked on on late night Sunday 13th April 2008
• There is now a login system for the site, about 90% done, but Ideator has not yet been adapted to work with it (although at least it gives you a greeting now), so the following points STILL APPLY.
• This initial version is NOT collaborative, it just stores your outline data in POSTDATA and cookies.
  Warning! The cookie expires when you close your browser, or sooner! So for now it's not exactly a secure storage. But it does at least persist if you go off to another page and come back, as you'd hope.
• You can navigate to sublists, and back to a list's parent-list.
• It is now possible to add new lists at last, without having to do egregious hacks with the escape codes. It isn't possible to make an existing item into a sublist, nor to remove a sublist from an item, except in terms of adding/removing the refernce at the end of the text (see next).
• It does now escape/filter-out its own special characters ("_," for separating items in a list, "_;" for separating lists, and "_:" for making references to lists) so if you put those in an item's text, they shouldn't have any special effect. For that matter, the _: list-reference designator no longer shows up in the text for editing sublist entries, nor is it needed. The downside to this, is it's no longer possible to remove sublist references at all once the're there, without clearing the whole outline.
• It doesn't escape HTML tags yet.
• In a similar way to what is planned for later versions, modifying the outline is currently done in a 2-step process: click a link for what sort of thing you want to do, then submit your edit. In later versions this scheme will give an opportunity to do+check resource locking before the user goes writing a big edit that they can't submit or that clashes with other changes that have happened since they started.
• You can now add new items, but so far only at the end because the "insert item" functionality is not coded right. The UI for the "insert item" mode is pretty ugly too.
• You can't remove items, or lists. You can remove REFERENCES to lists just as well as you can add references to lists, by adding or removing the special code at the end of the item text. That special code should not really appear there though. Note that removing a reference to a list does look a lot like removing the list, but the list is still there if you put the reference back again.
• There is now a "nuke whole outline" interface being added, in case your outline/cookie gets corrupted by whatever, or you just get it so full of cruft you can't stand it. Unlike the original dummy data, it only starts the thing off with one dummy item, in the root list.
• There's also a simple "Abandon this edit" link when you're in add/edit an item mode. This simply takes you back to "browsing the outline" mode, within the same list, with the outline unchanged. Handy perhaps if you clicked the wrong button, or changed your mind, etc.