Tip: Start a new discussion for each new topic

Tip: Start a new discussion for each new topic

This is just a friendly discussion forum tip: It would be great if you could start a new discussion/thread whenever you post about a new, unrelated topic. That way we can keep things somewhat organized and people new to the forum can see at a glance what topics and features are available to read about.

Thanks! And keep those posts and feature requests coming.

Dan

​

Just about the forum. People who are used to phpbb or SM have "expectations". Like being notified of posts, unread posts, or those silly smileys. Actually, forum s/w has a *lot* of features.

Are you proposing to become a full-blown forum app too? If not, it might be a move to adopt an existing one for that function.

If so, because it's that extensible, then more power to you, of course!

please just email any reply directly to me (if you care to reply that is).

​Forum software

When I originally decided to set up Luminotes forums, I thought long and hard about whether I should use existing forum software or instead extend Luminotes to handle forum-like functionality.

Here are the pros of using off-the-shelf forum software:
  • Features: As you mentioned, people have certain expectations of what their forum software should do. And lots of existing forum software meets those expectations.
  • Development time: Using third-party forum software would mean that I wouldn't have to develop it, so I could spend time on developing Luminotes proper.
And here are the cons of using existing forum software:
  • Integration: Doesn't easily integrate with Luminotes web site or user accounts. I didn't really want to require users to have a separate forum login account.
  • Deployment: Most "decent" forum software out there relies on PHP and MySQL in order to run. Luminotes is built on Python and PostgreSQL. So running separate forum software would be twice the system administration work, and possibly even twice the server requirements.
  • User interface: Although existing forum software definitely wins on features, I thought it would be kind of annoying if users had to learn one text input toolbar and interface to make their wiki and then a separate interface to write in the forum.
So based on those considerations, I eventually decided to add some basic forum functionality to Luminotes. I will definitely take feature requests for this forum. (I've been meaning to add email notification, actually.) And I haven't ruled out eventually switching to other forum software in the future if that turns out to make sense.

Anyway, let me know if you have any questions.

Dan

P.S. I emailed you a manual forum notification!

​Rx'd manual notification! :-)

  • Features: you will always be chasing, unless forums are a focus
  • Dev time: well, we know that's always at a premium, given
  • Integration: there are many examples of those writing bridges between, say, moodle, joomla and simplemachines. There are abstaction layers that handle both mysql and postgres too.
  • Deployment: Lumi does run on Python and Postgres. Many (not all) web "stuff" runs on mysql and php. So? What distro doesn't include all those by default? Certainly it is not "twice the server requriements" (unless you posit very constrained servers).
  • User Interface: that's a very legit concern. However, if ppl are in explicitly different gui areas, they can deal with that difference -- esp. if it's one that is popular and they likely know already.
Please don't get me wrong! I think that it is very cool that your framework allowed you to add forums so easily and leaverage existing code. That's very cool and I'm not diminishing it by my comments. It just IS cool.

In point of fact, I've been looking for an easy forum for folks about as long as I was (was!) looking for an easy notes app. I would love it if they were one in the same thing. I would kiss your hands all the way to your elbows!

Well.... I'd email virtual elbow kisses anyhow. :-)

It was a legit question and not meant to dis your current implementation at all. Like I said, it's very cool that your framework and cherrypy can absorb the additional functionality.

Just pointing out that it is a different specialization from notes doing a forum and it will involve a lot of extra effort from the team in order to meet existing expectations of forum s/w. That's all. Truly! (yes, I know the composition of the team)

The UI advances in the main notes would be of great benefit to a forum. No doubt about it. In part, I'm just being selfish and wanting your efforts on finishing the notes.

Of course, if your framework and overall goals were always for notes and forums I just wrote a bunch of hooie.

:-)

p.s.
I personally taught 4 staff of one place today about luminotes. 5 minutes each and I ran out of stuff to demo! -- and much of that was about internal policy on filing attachments and so on. If there is uptake, I will make sure they send you some coin. I can't see them not using it, as *everyone* has declared it easy to use. Else, I will send you some coin myself, because they *will* have their network and IT, phones, etc, documented with Luminotes. I have to do it with *something* and I pick Luminotes.

(yes, I've installed media wiki and moinmoin et alia. They're too hard for normal people to bother learning the markup language)

​Forum software, etc.

To answer a few of your excellent points:

I am actually running on a number of somewhat constrained servers rather than just one beefy server. So I really would have to add additional servers (or upgrade servers) to add additional software like MySQL and PHP. You're right; it probably wouldn't be twice the servers. But it would take additional resources. It's not out of the question, but it is a consideration.

Also, it's a somewhat minor technical detail, but by keeping all public-facing parts of the web site served from the exact same software, then setting up infrastructure like load balancing or caching becomes much easier.

And forum software is not my main focus, at least not currently. I'm just trying to make the best personal wiki and note taking software out there. I'm not trying to replace phpBB.

So your points are all well taken, and I did not take them as a "diss" in any sense of the word. :) By the way, if you have any particular forum software you'd like to recommend, please let me know about it!

I am glad to hear about the positive reception of Luminotes by your co-workers. Speaking of coin, if you can think of any particular improvements or features that would entice you or anyone else to buy Luminotes or subscribe, then please do let me know. I'm looking at earning subscriptions and purchases by making a wiki that people actually want to use, so anything that furthers that cause.. Well, I'd be interested to hear about it. :)

Dan

​Luminotes Desktop running as a process on XP

Hi Dan,

Love Luminotes, seems the answer to my needs. Very clear, uncluttered and does what I need it to do without having to learn a whole new wiki formatting syntax. I also like the fact that it uses logical formatting commands, like CTRL+B for bold, CTRL+I for italics and so on.

I use Luminotes Desktop since I'm frequently on the road and not always with net access, yet need to get notes in. I find that LD continues to run as a process after you quit the browser. Is there a way to kill the process without going into the Windows Task Manager?

I've seen the comments on these forums for linking, captioning, sub-headings (we really need that h1/h2/h3 thing) and so on and they're all excellent suggestions which will, in time, be implemented (pretty sure of that!). But a few things I'd love to see are

  1. Keywords/tags or categories (don't need both and the folksonomy offered by tags is better and makes for very quick searching)
  2. Nested notebooks. This would be really nifty. Actually, I see an equivalence between 'notebooks' and 'categories' and it's probably correct to think of notebooks as nothing more categories (except of course that one article can only belong to one notebook, whereas in a true category scenario you'd probably have the option of multiple categories). So it's really only tags I'm talking about.
  3. Smart typography because it just looks good.
  4. For the desktop version, a wider range of available fonts.
  5. More options in formatting: sub/super scripts, anchors in links, headings, justification, basic font resizing and colors. Too much? My apologies.

Incidentally, apropos the discussion on webclipping, Evernote's webclipping stinks. Try clipping the New York Times front page, for instance. Surfulater Version 3 has a much, much more accurate clipper, even on 'difficult' pages (like BBC, NYT and so on). Worth a look.

​Stopping Luminotes Desktop / other features

With the current release, there isn't yet a way to stop the Luminotes Desktop server process after you quit the browser without using the Windows Task Manager. However, the very next release will include a link at the top of the page to shut down the Luminotes Desktop process completely.

As for your other feature requests:

Keywords/tags/categories/nested notebooks: Tags are in the works, and in fact the underlying code already supports them to some degree. I just have to come up with a decent user interface for them that fits into Luminotes well.

Smart typography: I'm not familiar with the term.. What exactly do you mean by this?

More fonts: That's a good idea, and not something I had thought of. It's going on the to-do list!

Formatting: I'm definitely planning additional formatting options like the ones you mention.

Web clipping: I haven't seen Surfulater before. I'll have to check that out.

Dan

​Smart Typography

Hi Dan,

First, many thanks for the quick reply. Second, sorry about posting this here. I think I screwed up; it should have been in another forum/section, but no matter.

By "smart typography", I meant curly quotes, proper ellipses and em-dashes, etc. For instance, this -- as an em-dash -- is simply awful. It's much better with the — or — code. Basically, we'd need some method by which

  • opening double quotes ("some word) are converted to proper curly quotes; ditto for closing quotes and single quote marks;
  • Three dots ... into a proper ellipsis;
  • And em- and en-dashes from --- to an em-dash and -- to an en-dash.

Frankly, this is a level of fussiness that almost everyone can do without, but I just thought it might push LD that little bit further. As I said, it's quite un-essential; if it's too much effort, please forget I mentioned it. I imagine you have quite enough on your plate as it is!

Gautam

​Re: Smart Typography

Thanks for pointing these out! I just added them to my ever-growing to-do list. These features do seem like "nice-to-haves", so I'll probably do things like the additional formatting buttons first. However they would definitely make a good addition to Luminotes.

Dan

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