Table of Contents
In Wagn, everything is a card. Right now you're reading a card called "Introduction." On the sidebar at the right you see another card called "Wiki on Wheels." Another card holds our logo image, and as you click around on green links, you'll see that nearly every webpage on Wagn.org is a card. Cards are both our building blocks and our glue.
User pages, images, blogs, tickets, forms ... they're all cards.
Card Names
Every card has a unique name. For example, there can only be one card named "Introduction." This makes web addresses easy to read and links very easy to create, and Wagn simplifies things even further by ignoring singular/plural, and capitalization. So if I make a link to introductions (lower-case and plural), it will still go to this card (even though Introduction is capitalized and singular).
When there is a little triangle to the left of a card's name, clicking the name (or the triangle) opens and closes the card. This lets us fit lots of cards onto a single page, which is a big part of the aim of Wagn — making it easy not just to create and edit information online, but to organize and reorganize it, too.
Tabs
At the top right of every card you will notice an Edit tab. Clicking on it allows you to edit the card, including changing the card's name and type (if you have permission).
Card Types
Every card also has a type. For example, this card is a Basic card — the default type. Cards of other types will show their type just to the right of their name. If you sign up for an account on a Wagn, you'll get a User card. The logo in the top right is an Image card. A card's type can determine how it's formatted, what kind of editor you see when you edit it, which searches find the card, and several other things.
Some types — like images, users, and searches — are built in, but Wagn users can also create new types on the fly.
Inclusions
You may have noticed that there often seem to be cards inside other cards. We call these "inclusions". For example, here we'll include a Sandbox card that you can feel free to change:
Have fun using this card to play withX YX simple editing / commenting. If you want to get into more hard-core experimentation (renaming, changing types,
...
You can open, close, and edit it right there in place. Wagneers — people who build things with Wagn cards — don't like writing the same information lots of times, much less updating it in lots of places, so they put that information in a card and include it wherever they need it. In other words, Wagn is very DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself).
As another example of inclusion, this "Introduction" card is included in the Documentation card. If you wanted to see just the Introduction card or the "History" card standing alone, you could click on the arrow to the right of the card's name.
Database Features
The features mentioned above are incremental improvements upon wikis. Wagn really shines when you start to use it as a database:
- plus cards let users connect cards to create new cards to form a third. Pointers offer another way to relate two or more cards to each other. This is where the structure begins.
- WQL, our wiki query language, lets you find and organize cards using plusses and other relationships.
- formatting combines inclusions, plus cards, and WQL to offer easy, dynamic form building and versatile data presentation.
Most casual Wagn users won't ever bother getting their heads around these features, and they don't need to. In fact, that's the idea — you should be able to ease your way in, and go as deep as you like. If you think you might want to go deep, try out some of the most innovative features, and perhaps even build a Wagn of your own, awesome! Become a Wagneer!
