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Cards
The most important Decko concept is the [[card]]. Cards are the basic building blocks of Decko websites, or decks.
Cards are inspired by wiki pages. Like wiki pages, cards have revision histories, human-friendly names, and easy in-place editing interfaces. But we don't call them pages, because the word page already has a pretty clear meaning on the web: a webpage. But on Decko, a given webpage might be constructed out of dozens or even hundreds of cards. Cards not only hold lots of different content that can be combined and recombined in flexible ways, they also determine how a webpage is structured, who can read it, and how it behaves.
In Decko, everything is a card: [[images|images]], [[users|users]], [[files|files]], [[layouts|layouts]]... they're all cards. In fact, each of those is a [[Cardtype]]. Every card has a type, which, among other things, determines what kind of content the card has. It's very easy to create new cardtypes; you just create a new card with the type "Cardtype".
Cardnames
If you're thinking that you've heard this "everything is a X" story before, then you're right. Wordpress says that everything is a post. Drupal says that everything is a node. And so on. But Decko takes the idea further. When you break a Wordpress post into smaller bits, you get something that is not a post. Same for a Drupal node. But when you add more granularity to cards, you get more cards.
The key concept behind this niftiness is Decko's use of patterned names. Like any wiki, every Decko card has to have a unique name. Unlike most wikis, you can combine card names to form meaningful [[compound names]]. For example, if you have a card named "John" and one named "image", you can combine the two to form a new card named "John+image",which is a child of both "John" and "image".
This simple notion provides the basis upon which Decko structures can be created. You can use naming patterns to create all kinds of rules, for example to add a +image field to all User cards. You can then write queries to find all users with or without an image. You can also add more names to create new compounds, for example to discuss John's image at "John+image+discussion".
Nesting and Views
To make sense and make use of all these cards, we must be able to connect them to each other. You can do so in the traditional web/wiki sense by [[linking]] them with hyperlinks, of course. More unusual is Decko's deep reliance on [[nesting]], in which one card visually includes another.
What exactly is included depends on the [[view|view]]. If you nest a card in "content" view, for example, you will see only its content. In "name" view only its name. But there are many other views built-in, some with both name and content, some with metadata, some with functional interfaces, etc.
It's possible to nest cards anywhere. For example, we can nest the logo card here:{{*logo}}...but the more exciting nests are patterned nests, and for those you need rules.
Sets, Settings, and Rules
The most important Decko concept is the [[card]]. Cards are the basic building blocks of Decko websites, or decks.
Cards are inspired by wiki pages. Like wiki pages, cards have revision histories, human-friendly names, and easy in-place editing interfaces. But we don't call them pages, because the word page already has a pretty clear meaning on the web: a webpage. But on Decko, a given webpage might be constructed out of dozens or even hundreds of cards. Cards not only hold lots of different content that can be combined and recombined in flexible ways, they also determine how a webpage is structured, who can read it, and how it behaves.
In Decko, everything is a card: [[images|images]], [[users|users]], [[files|files]], [[layouts|layouts]]... they're all cards. In fact, each of those is a [[Cardtype]]. Every card has a type, which, among other things, determines what kind of content the card has. It's very easy to create new cardtypes; you just create a new card with the type "Cardtype".
Cardnames
If you're thinking that you've heard this "everything is a X" story before, then you're right. Wordpress says that everything is a post. Drupal says that everything is a node. And so on. But Decko takes the idea further. When you break a Wordpress post into smaller bits, you get something that is not a post. Same for a Drupal node. But when you add more granularity to cards, you get more cards.
The key concept behind this niftiness is Decko's use of patterned names. Like any wiki, every Decko card has to have a unique name. Unlike most wikis, you can combine card names to form meaningful [[compound names]]. For example, if you have a card named "John" and one named "image", you can combine the two to form a new card named "John+image",
This simple notion provides the basis upon which Decko structures can be created. You can use naming patterns to create all kinds of rules, for example to add a +image field to all User cards. You can then write queries to find all users with or without an image. You can also add more names to create new compounds, for example to discuss John's image at "John+image+discussion".
What exactly is included depends on the [[view|view]]. If you nest a card in "content" view, for example, you will see only its content. In "name" view only its name. But there are many other views built-in, some with both name and content, some with metadata, some with functional interfaces, etc.
It's possible to nest cards anywhere. For example, we can nest the logo card here:{{*logo}}...but the more exciting nests are patterned nests, and for those you need rules.
Sets, Settings, and Rules