Idea

Sorting almost works. Oddly, some single-digit date months have a zero in front of them, and some don't. Maybe this could be fixed with a migration? See http://sandwagn.wagn.org/wagn/content_sort_3

  --John Abbe.....Tue Apr 21 15:32:14 -0700 2009

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awesome. thanks for breaking these out. wouldn't be a super hard migration, but it looks like there would need to be a functional fix first since the ones with singles are later in the process. Let's push until we update our Date functionality.

  --Ethan (Not signed in).....Wed Apr 22 07:02:18 -0700 2009

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Not sure what you mean by "the ones with singles are later in the process". Are the zeros being generated in some situations but not others, such that if we cleaned it up we'd get a mix again over time as people keep adding more dates?

  --John Abbe.....Wed Apr 22 07:37:11 -0700 2009

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Ethan wrote up a bunch of useful stuff about dates on What's up with date?, copied here:

--John

 

 

There are several realms in which I want to improve dates, most of which should be placed in a broader context:

 

 

editing-in-place

 

 

Right now, there are 3 different ways we do in-place editing in Wagn:

 

1. open card views, in which case you click the edit tab to start editing. I like this feature and am guessing we'll always want an option like this, but we definitely don't want to include every card on every page in open view.

2. double-clicking to edit. This is fine as far as it goes, but (a) I think it should be optional, because it doesn't really make sense in some contexts, (b) we need to improve the feature, because it sometimes triggers editing when you don't intend it too (this is ticketed), and (c) it's not enough for certain cards, especially lists, because with those it's not clear where you click to edit the list itself rather than the list items

3. extra edit interface. Currently only pointers have this (the add/edit link), and in fact if you want to render Pointers *without* the extra interface, you can't. I see this as a significant problem (though we can often workaround it by including a search for the pointer items). More relevant here, I think you should be able to add these extra interface bits to any cardtype, including dates. I'd like to come up with a very unobtrusive but clear icon to use for this end.

 

One way I think this could work is that we should have a setting called something like "*in place" where you can set it to use double-clicks, extra interface, or both. You should be able override the setting with inclusion syntax.

 

 

So that goes to the issue of whether you have to double-click, but perhaps the biggest pain is the extra steps you have to take upon starting into edit view.

 

opening the date editor

 

 

Whether creating a new card or editing an existing one, it doesn't make sense to me that you should have the extra step of clicking on the date to get the editor *after* already being in edit mode. I think the interface should just be there in most cases, or at least that should be the default behavior when you're editing *just* the date card. In the context of a bigger form, sometimes it's nice not to eat up too much real estate when with a full calendar when the default date is usually right.

 

 

I don't yet have a real proposal for this one, though my strong suspicion is that we won't get into fixing this until we can move over to a jQuery-based calendar from the custom one we have now.

 

 

overhauling dates

 

 

Still none of this gets close to some of our bigger ambitions with dates. Currently a date card is just stored as a bit of text with date information in it. What I want is for Wagn to have more smarts about how dates work, and to be able to create a virtual card about any date and time. That card could then be used as a place holder for all kinds of things - cards created and edited on that date, other cards with (as in your case) due dates that would "point" to that date (rather than just be unintegrated text), etc. Having done this, it would be easy to create all kinds of date and time visualizations of your system.

 

 

~~~~~~~

 

 

I don't know where all this should go, but I'm hopeful that we'll get the opportunity to work on all of these before too long -- it has the ring of fundability to it, if we can find folks for whom Wagn is perfect, except for the date handling :).

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BTW, I'm working on open editing in general right now. I have some experimental code. I want to combine this idea with simultaneous edit capabilities. I was making some notes here: http://etherpad.openstewardship.net/edit-collab

 

Dates are one of the things that I'm interested in. I have an extension to SmartNames that will parse dates as parts of cardnames and use an alternate key representation so when you use different date formats, you still get the same card. It would be good to share the date parsing from that mod with Date types.