Command Wiki: Daily Driving and Plugins

 All Posts Tagged: Command Wiki 

As a natural consequence to fulfilling its educational objectives, this application would also be good at serving as a daily driver. There will always be new and old information that remains on the periphery of users' minds, and there will always be new things to learn in the future.

Having the ability to serve as a way to connect knowledge with implementing the knowledge is like note taking, but it becomes something of a different animal as a whole. It's more multi-purpose than note taking.

It's nice to have a place to keep ideas you've thought about, even years in the past. Maybe you put some effort into learning a language or an application years ago, and want to pick up where you left off. 

Classes of Plugins

• Document Compatibility Plugin
• Visual Panel Plugins
• Data Compatibility Plugin
• Tool Wizard Plugin for Tool Search
• General Extension Plugin

The reason to divide plugins up into types is to provide some specific guidance on each one, so that as much work can be done for developers as possible. Smaller and more directly purposed portions can facilitate more convenient contributions. Plugin types might have inherent conveniences that benefit from being separate.

Document Compatibility Plugins

This type of plugin deals with adding on compatibility with specific high-level file-types like word processing documents and spreadsheet or even diagramming and presentation documents.

The application's job is to provide an interface, and tools that can facilitate specific compatibility as much as possible. This could incorporate rudimentary text-based parsing tools, as well as more advanced coded tools.

Document Compatibility Plugins would come in three stages of development, attempting to have any particular combination of these three items, but not necessarily all three at the same time.

• Recognize View / Embed
• Data Interpreter / Converter
• Format-specific Editing

Visual Panel Plugins

Primarily, these are ready to embed onto a page, as opposed to a user having to combine or develop them on their own.

Any kind of graph or set of buttons or tools put into an frame that can be embedded on a wiki page.

These graphs or tools are not extremely limited by method of origin in language tools to create their components. However there should very much be a basic syntax provided for built-in GUI widgets and formats. This basic syntax might be the general syntax used throughout the wiki.

They can obviously integrate realtime data from bash scripts and programs, embedded terminal windows, or the wiki - for live charts and indicators.

A visual panel might include a search widget for a specific context, or some notifications.

Data Compatibility Plugins

A data compatibility plugin is about being able to interpret pasted data, or output data from an application, or any particular data format like XML or JSON, markup version, anything that converts or interprets something relatively simple to some other form that the wiki or the user can understand and use in a wiki context, or other context.

Tool Wizard Plugins

Tool wizard plugins are built specifically to be searched for in a singular tool search context.

The general idea of these is to be somewhat small, but numerous. 

It is possible that these tools could be very sandboxed, and as such be able to be combined and recombined as modular multi-tools that can also be placed on visual panels.

General Extension Plugins

General extension plugins are plugins for the whole application.

The idea of the application is that hopefully there will be so many ways to customize it, that there will be as few reasons as possible to want or need to create larger extension plugins.

But these might consist of added online capabilities or terminal integrations, or application data engine changes.