If you change the "Description" card to be "Summary" it will automatically change every card named X+Description to X+Summary.   Does that help in this case?

You mean literally http://hub.personaldataecosystem.org/wagn/description with no prefixes or anything?

Also there are lots of native Wagn cards with description in the name:

http://hub.personaldataecosystem.org/wagn/Pointer+description

I don't want to screw these up so will wait for further reply from you before trying this.

  --Joseph Boyle.....Sat Apr 30 14:33:18 -0700 2011

Also Description is used in other of our cardtypes that we don't necessarily want to change: http://hub.personaldataecosystem.org/wagn/Katherine_Kern+Description

  --Joseph Boyle.....Sat Apr 30 14:34:54 -0700 2011

Also there is already a card named Summary, probably since this is already a field name in one cardtype. I would have to delete this in order to rename Description to Summary - what effects would this have?

  --Joseph Boyle.....Sat Apr 30 17:47:54 -0700 2011

I did literally mean the "description" card, which, true, is linked to all of the cards you mentioned. There are lots of ways you could go here; pretty much all of them will mean doing some renaming by hand, but the question is how much.

For example, if you've not yet used the word "Summary" anywhere and you have lots of company+description cards, you could change description to summary and then change all the newly renamed cardtype+summary cards back to description by hand. Or you could change the including cardtype cards to use the new +summary name.

What you need is something more nuanced, where you can change the plus names (fields) of just certain ones. We're hoping to add bulk update functionality for cases like this, but we don't have anything yet. It is possible to do some of this through the backend, but that would be need to be paid work.

As for your suggestion about interface for those bulk updates -- very interesting idea. We would probably want confirmation prompting, because many times the intent is to make a different field, not rename an old one, but it would be great if wagn were smarter about that.

  --Ethan McCutchen.....Sat Apr 30 18:20:54 -0700 2011

Wagn does have good cascading renaming in some cases, so I was surprised it didn't in this case. I think it is because a cardtype's schema is only coded in the +*type+*content template which is free text that would require parsing, rather than a list data structure.

Another similar issue is about 60 cards with names ending in +Nonprofit that need to change to +Organization. I renamed the Nonprofit card to Organization1 (which was already its codename) and that did change about 60 cards and 60 references to them from their parent cards. Now the name is closer to Organization but not identical. I couldn't change Nonprofit to Organization itself without deleting Organization itself first, presumably.

In many cases we are using the same word for a cardtype and for field names in various cardtypes referencing that cardtype. Is this bad practice and is there a recommended convention?

  --Joseph Boyle.....Sat Apr 30 19:42:22 -0700 2011

Yep, you've nailed the issue with the renaming -- there's currently no way to merge or split names, and you need both. I like your "Organization1" workaround; it simplifies the one-at-a-time renaming for sure.

I don't have a strong recommendation for or against using the cardtype name as a field name; it does conflate names a bit, but it also makes structures easier to understand / remember.

  --Ethan McCutchen.....Sun May 01 14:25:45 -0700 2011