Place the ContactInformationTemplate on all of the contacts in your wiki.

(You may be wondering if there's a way to avoid even the repetition of adding the reference to the template to all your tiddlers. The answer is yes, and we'll be getting there in a couple chapters.)

Edit the ContactInformationTemplate so that a contact's family members each get their own bullet point, nested underneath the Family bullet point, listing their name and phone number, like this:

• Family:
  • JohnDoe: 888-555-9999
  • EmilyDoe: 888-555-1111

Tip: You'll need to use HTML for the inner bulleted list, as wikitext lists can't be interleaved successfully with $list widgets. While it's possible to make everything show up correctly while still writing the outer bulleted list in wikitext, if you're struggling with the formatting, it may be easier to switch the outer list to an HTML list as well.

As a reminder, to nest lists in HTML, put another <ul> opening tag inside an <li> tag.

What is the alphabetically last description that any button on the editor toolbar uses? (The description is what shows up when you hover over the button, minus the indication of the keyboard shortcut. No cheating by hovering over every button!)

You'll need some additional information for this one:

• Remember that everything's a tiddler? Buttons in TiddlyWiki's interface are tiddlers too!
• A tiddler is part of the editor toolbar if it is tagged $:/tags/EditorToolbar.
• You'll need to start your filter with all[shadows] to get any results.
• Your filter expression will have more steps than any we've seen so far. Add one step to the filter expression at a time, inspecting the result to determine how you need to modify the list (what step you need to add) next. You'll eventually reach a point where you have a bunch of results that are wrapped in curly braces, like {{$:/language/Buttons/Paint/Description}}. When you get here, add the following filter steps to the end of your filter: split[{{]split[}}].

And here are two hints if you need them:

1. How do you think we would define the description of a button in the TiddlyWiki data model?
2. The content of a language tiddler, like $:/language/Buttons/Paint/Description, is stored in its text field.

This one is intended to be a little bit above your level at the moment – we won't get to some of the concepts involved until chapter 6, Looking Under the Hood – so you might not be able to figure it out. But spend some time working on it before you look at the answer.

Update your template that displays a list of links and backlinks so that the list doesn't appear if there are no links or backlinks.

Create a tiddler called $:/yourname/TiddlerLinkSummary. Make this tiddler display a simple bulleted list of all backlinks of the current tiddler. (Since we will need to make this more complex momentarily, use a $list widget, not a list-links macro.) Then make this content included at the bottom of every tiddler.

Edit $:/yourname/TiddlerLinkSummary to show a list of the forward links as well. We don't want the wikitext to get too repetitive, so create a macro to hold the bits that are the same in both.

Edit the journal tiddler again by clicking the pencil icon in its upper-right corner, and add some boilerplate that uses the following types of formatting in the notes editor:

• Bold, italics, and monospaced text
• A bulleted list
• A numbered list
• A section heading
• A block quote
• A code snippet (called a “monospaced block” on the editor toolbar)

For the lists, block quotes, and code snippets, note that you need to have at least one blank line both above and below them to ensure everything displays correctly.

We'll be learning more wikitext syntax as we go through the rest of the book. You can also refer to the Wikitext Reference appendix for a listing of the syntax you're most likely to want. That said, if you don't feel comfortable with what you've seen so far, you might consider doing this exercise a second time; if you feel uncomfortable using wikitext, it will be a major drag on your ability to accomplish more complicated things in TiddlyWiki.

Modify the MeetingList so that instead of separating the meetings with a simple line break, they form a bulleted list.

Hint 1: Remember that HTML code for creating a bulleted list?

Hint 2: The contents of the list widget are rendered once for every tiddler output by the filter. Which parts of the HTML code for creating a list need to be used repeatedly, and which need to be used only once?

Our buttons don't display very nicely:

• They're absolutely gigantic on the toolbar and have text on them instead of an icon.
• Their shape doesn't match that of the other tiddlers.
• They don't have tooltips.
• They don't have a description in the Tools tab of the sidebar.

Correct these issues. You'll want to refer to an existing tiddler on the toolbar to see how each of these things is done.

Tip: The fastest way to choose an icon from the set that comes with TiddlyWiki is to open the tag manager and pretend to pick an icon from the drop-down. Each icon shows its full tiddler name, so you can then use that name elsewhere.

Add these new buttons (created in Ex:NewContactButton and Ex:NewMeetingButton) to the toolbar above the search box in the sidebar. This will require applying a tag to their tiddlers.

Suppose that the following macro is being used to validate whether the user is authorized to access something:

\define checkAuthorization(password)
<$list filter="[[$password$]match{$:/config/SecretPasswordExample}]">
  The user is authorized.
</$list>
\end

<<checkAuthorization "">>

Without looking up the password, figure out what you can fill in between the quotation marks in the macro call to bypass the password check. Check your answer by editing the live example above.

Try changing the title of one of your knowledge tiddlers to not be in CamelCase (add some spaces to it, and/or change the capitalization).

• Notice the drop-down showing you any links that will break when you rename the tiddler.
• Visit the tiddlers those other links were contained in and update the links to match. You'll have to use the [[square bracket syntax]] now.
• What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of camel-case linking? If you have a TiddlyWiki use case in mind for yourself, do you think camel-case links will be a good idea there?

Note: If you rename tiddlers often, the Relink plugin can update the links automatically.

Select a contact you didn't add an image for above. Place an image for this contact in a folder called images next to your example TiddlyWiki, and use the _canonical_uri field on a new tiddler to reference this contact's image. Check to be sure the image is displayed on the contact tiddler as expected.

Create a tiddler called CaptionsByTag. This tiddler should contain an input widget into which the user types the name of a tag. A table underneath the input widget should show all of the tiddlers with this tag along with their captions, if any. That would look something like this:

Note: You'll have to use raw HTML tables to get this to display correctly – wikitext tables don't work if you interrupt them with a list widget. An HTML table has this basic form:

<table>
  <tr>
    <th>Header 1</th>
    <th>Header 2</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Cell 1</td>
    <td>Cell 2</td>
  </tr>
</table>

The equivalent wikitext table would be:

|!Header 1|!Header 2|
|Cell 1|Cell 2|

tr stands for table row, th for table header, and td for table data.

Suppose you have a tiddler MyCar, along with a series of tiddlers describing the items you keep in your car. Why should each item state that it belongs in your car, rather than the car listing out all of the items it contains?

Create the car tiddler in your example wiki and relate several items to it, using each of the four methods discussed in this section. What methods do you like best?

What happens if you transclude tiddler A into tiddler B, and tiddler B into tiddler A?

Close your new journal tiddler and open it again.

Repeat the previous exercise, but use a conditional $set widget. It's OK if the behavior when the at field is empty, rather than missing, differs from the previous exercise.

Modify the tiddler containing my-funny-class so that that class's styles apply only if the config tiddler $:/config/ShowFunnyText is set to yes.

What do you think happens if you run the filter [tag[Person]title[EmployeeInformationSystem]tag[Application]]? Assume that the EmployeeInformationSystem tiddler is tagged Application but not Person.

Check your answer by running the filter in TiddlyWiki, after ensuring that EmployeeInformationSystem is tagged appropriately.

Create a tiddler called ContactCard that displays a drop-down menu from which you can select any contact in the wiki. Underneath the drop-down menu, the selected contact is transcluded through the ContactInformationTemplate, showing the contact's details.

Edit the ContactInformationTemplate so that it tries to include a picture for each contact. If the tiddler name is, for example, JaneDoe, and there is a tiddler called JaneDoe/Picture, Jane's picture, at most 300 pixels wide, should appear at the top of the tiddler. No error should be displayed if such a picture doesn't exist (hint: a filter operator called is[tiddler] will come in handy).

Add an image for one of your contacts and confirm that everything displays as expected for contacts that have a picture and for contacts that do not.

Create a ContactList, similar to our MeetingList, that shows all contacts in alphabetical order by their first name.

Tip: To create a new tiddler and start it with the contents of an existing tiddler, click the "more" drop-down on the existing tiddler's toolbar and choose Clone.

Modify the ContactList so that contacts with no phone number are excluded.

Return to the radio buttons we added to the ContactInformationTemplate in Ex:FamilyRadioButton to display the contact information of a family member of the contact. As written in the answer of that exercise, it is in need of a qualify macro so that if multiple contacts are open, they can have different family members selected at once. Add this macro call. (If you wrote your version in a way that doesn't require qualification to work correctly with multiple contacts open, first modify it to store the selected contact in a temp tiddler like the book's version does.)

Create a set of tabs to show all contacts in the wiki. Take a look through the tabs – what isn't displaying right, and what might that mean?

Adjust the $:/yourname/TiddlerTypeTemplates/Contact component of the ViewTemplate so that the contact information template is used only on tiddlers tagged Contact.

Suppose that in the MeetingList, we want each meeting to display not only its name, but also the name of the tiddler we're using to look at the information (or, more precisely, the current tiddler as defined by TiddlyWiki). That is, since we're viewing the output in the MeetingList tiddler, it should say MeetingList. The list might look something like this:

• An item on MeetingList: EmployeeProfileSetupMeeting
• An item on MeetingList: SecondMeeting

Modify your list widget to achieve this output. The output should continue to be correct if you copy and paste (or transclude) the list widget into a different tiddler – i.e., you cannot simply write MeetingList literally but must dynamically retrieve the title of the tiddler the list widget is in.

Go to the WikiStatistics tiddler, originally created in the exercise Ex:WikiStatistics, and replace any numbers that you can with an appropriate $count widget.

Our meetings have two fields, at and participants, which don't show up anywhere on the meeting tiddlers. Create a new template tiddler, MeetingInformationTemplate, and add a table something like the following.

| !Time|20200531013141000|
| !Participants|JaneDoe|

Obviously, your version should include the correct information for whichever tiddler the template is being transcluded into. Don't miss the space before the ! in Time and Participants in the wikitext, which causes the headings to be right-aligned rather than centered.

Transclude this template at the top of all your meeting tiddlers.

Create a new system tiddler, then close it and go locate it again.

Make a button labeled Created Now that resets the created date of the current tiddler to the current time. Place the button on a template, or simply on a test tiddler, and try resetting the created time of the tiddler.

Write and test filter expressions for the following criteria:

1. All tiddlers tagged with Application.
2. All tiddlers tagged with both Application and OnboardingProcess.
   • You'll need to add the OnboardingProcess tag to at least one application if you haven't done so already, if you want to see any results.
3. The tiddler JaneDoe, but only if it is tagged with Application.
   • You won't get any results for this one, obviously, since Jane is not an application, so afterwards you might want to try adding the tag to Jane's tiddler so you can see how it behaves then.
4. All tiddlers that link to the tiddler EmployeeProfileSetupMeeting.
   • Hint: In addition to links[], there is a backlinks[] operator.
5. All tiddlers that link to the tiddler EmployeeProfileSetupMeeting and are not daily-journal tiddlers.

Let's do a bit of formatting now. It probably will look better if the excerpt starts on a new line after the title, especially once we get this into two columns. An easy way to do that in HTML is to place the excerpt macro call in a <div> tag (short for division), which is a generic way to group content together, so go ahead and do that and check that it works.

In addition, let's wrap the Links and Backlinks sections, including the titles, each in a div (you can do this within the macro). We'll need to have them in separate divs to get them to appear in two columns.

Lastly, wrap the whole thing (both the Links and Backlinks sections) in one more div.

Aside from the excerpts appearing on separate lines from the tiddler titles, you should not see any difference in output yet – we've merely made it possible to style with CSS.

Compose and run filters to answer the following questions:

1. How many tiddlers are in the wiki?
2. How many of those are system tiddlers?
3. What meetings contain a link to JaneDoe?
   • Hint: Work backwards.
4. Which contact has the alphabetically earliest phone number?
5. Which tiddlers have text in a field called at?
6. Which tiddlers contain the words JaneDoe and help somewhere in their text field? Use only a single filter step.

In the section on dynamic lists, we used the value of the variable <<currentTiddler>>, without knowing exactly what it was. Review the use of that variable in the dynamic lists section. What does this usage tell you about the interaction of the current tiddler and the $list widget?

Create a tiddler called DateFormatter that allows you to choose any non-system tiddler in the wiki and a field on that tiddler from drop-down menus, then displays the date stored in that field in at least five different formats. The formats displayed should be configurable by creating tiddlers in $:/config/DateFormatter/Formats.

If the field chosen can't be interpreted as a date, the text (not a date) should appear where the formatted date otherwise would.

Tip: The fields[] operator gets the names of the fields present on its input tiddlers.

Here's an example of what it might look like:

Modify the template you created in Ex:WikipediaLinkTemplate so that if the articleName variable is not defined, the article name will instead be taken from the articlename field of the current tiddler.

• Note the lowercase n – field names can't contain uppercase letters.
• The else filter operator, which adds a constant string to the pipeline if there are no input tiddlers, will be useful here. You will also need to put !is[blank] before the else operator – we'll explain why once you've completed this exercise.

In Ex:MoveContactInformation, we edited the list field of $:/tags/ViewTemplate, which means that we now have an overridden shadow tiddler for that tag. (You can confirm this by looking under the tag pill or in the Shadows or Explorer sidebar view – it will no longer be listed in bold.)

In this case, that's not the end of the world, since the tag contains no body text and it's relatively unlikely extra elements will be added to this list in a future version of TiddlyWiki (thus necessitating a manual merge if we want them to show up). However, suppose we want to be purists and avoid overriding a shadow tiddler unless absolutely necessary. How can we achieve the same effect without needing to override $:/tags/ViewTemplate?

Delete the overridden shadow tiddler $:/tags/ViewTemplate prior to attempting this exercise to put your $:/yourname/TiddlerTypeTemplates/ templates back in their default position, so you can tell if you've succeeded.

The $edit-text widget can edit any field on any tiddler, so we don't have to use a temporary tiddler if we don't want to. In the example above, we could just update the userwhoclicked field directly as the user types.

Look up the documentation for the $edit-text widget to learn how to select which field the widget should edit, then change the example to behave accordingly.

Add the tiddlers under $:/yourname/TiddlerTypeTemplates/ to the edit template as well. What do you notice about where they appear? Does it make sense to have them here?

In the tiddler above, define a second variable called eis with the value Employee Information System, and replace all references to the EIS or Employee Information System with the value of the eis variable. Make sure the disclaimer still shows up correctly.

Update the MeetingInformationTemplate to use a fallback to display the text (no time specified) if there is no at field on the tiddler.

Try calling a macro that doesn't exist (say, one called notamacro). What happens?

Make the size of the excerpt configurable via a configuration tiddler. Call the configuration tiddler $:/config/LinkExcerptLength.

Take a few minutes to poke around in the Explorer section of the More sidebar tab and look into a few system tiddlers to see how they're organized. You can safely edit a system tiddler to look at its source if you like; just be sure to click the X button to discard changes when you're done.

Add a series of radio buttons on the ContactInformationTemplate that allow you to view some information about each family member of the current tiddler.

Repeat the previous exercise, but this time use a filter rather than a macro to combine the tel: part and the phone number. You may need to visit the TiddlyWiki documentation to find an appropriate filter operator.

Fix the issue identified in the previous exercise, Ex:ContactTabs, so that all contacts display all information correctly.

Hint 1: You'll need to create a template tiddler. You can specify the name of a template used to render each tab using the template parameter to the tabs macro.

Hint 2: The currentTab variable contains the name of the tiddler being rendered as the current tab.

If you get really stuck, read the TiddlyWiki documentation on the tabs macro, which explains how to do this.

By default, all of the tabs will have ugly system-tiddler names on them, like $:/yourname/Views. Fix this so they have friendly names like we defined at the beginning of this section.

Revisit the tiddler you created in the previous exercise.

• Logically, is it a child of that meeting? Or is it a separate idea that just happened to occur during that meeting?
• Would it be better to use a different kind of relationship, like a link?
• Think about the title you chose: does it serve as metacommentary on the idea?

Suppose that, during our meeting, Jane gave us some advice about the company that probably shouldn't stray. We might want to put that in a separate tiddler to reduce the chance we accidentally copy and paste it over to someone else who asks what happened at the meeting.

Create such a tiddler with the following text, and make it a child of the EmployeeProfileSetupMeeting, so we'll still be able to keep track of it:

JaneDoe told me, while we were together at the EmployeeProfileSetupMeeting, that I should be very careful about saying the word "fudge" in this office, due to an incident involving Robert at the 2018 Christmas party that nobody wants to talk about.

Check the OnboardingProcess table of contents again. Did you get a third level of hierarchy?

If you didn't do it while reading, go back to the fudge tiddler and give it appropriate tags and links. You can link to some nonexistent tiddlers if you like.

Our initial motivation for extracting the now-infamous fudge tiddler from the EmployeeProfileSetupMeeting tiddler was so that we wouldn't accidentally share that information with somebody. Suppose that everyone else at the company also uses TiddlyWiki, so we always share our notes as raw wikitext instead of rendered/formatted output so recipients can paste it directly into their own wikis. In this case, we can rely on transclusion to protect us provided that the fudge tiddler's title isn't too revealing: if we copy the whole tiddler without noticing this inclusion, the recipient won't get the transcluded tiddler and thus won't see our embarrassing notes.

All this is to say, transclude the fudge tiddler into the EmployeeProfileSetupMeeting tiddler. What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing it this way as opposed to linking or tagging?

Write a filter to find all tiddlers mentioning fudge that don't list Jane as a participant. Use two filter runs.

Add my-funny-class from above (or any styling you like, as long as it is distinctive) to a global stylesheet in your wiki and apply the class to some text.

Add a checkbox to the control panel on a new subtab within the Settings tab called Styles, allowing this value to be toggled on and off, so the user can make text look funny only if they so desire.

In a new tiddler in your wiki, create a link to Google using HTML, with Google as the link text. The element used to create links is <a>; the href attribute contains the URL of the link, and the content is the text of the link.

Create a tiddler called TodaysHoliday which says It's ''The Day'' today!, where The Day is the name of the holiday that is occurring today, according to the data tiddler. Unless you happen to be doing this exercise on one of the four holidays listed above, you'll need to make up and add your own holiday with today's date so you can check the result.

You may need to look at the documentation for the now macro to figure out how to get today's date in the month/day format.

Try out another option for hosting and saving your TiddlyWiki.

Find some notes you've recently taken, in any format, and review them to see if there are any ideas that would be well served by being developed as evergreen notes. These might be part of a journal, annotations you made in a book, ideas for a project, or scribbles about a lecture you attended. Write down what contexts these ideas would belong in and what other ideas they would be related to.

What HTML element is used to insert an image? You may wish to search the web to find the answer.

Add a little bit of text to the right of the Go button in Ex:JumpToTiddler that displays "Exists!" in green if the tiddler name currently entered into the input field exists, and "Not found." in red if it doesn't. This text should immediately update as you type.

Hint: To quickly change the color of some text, you can wrap it with a span, like <span style="color:blue;">the text</span>.

Using your browser's element inspector, determine:

1. What the class attribute of the blue square below is.
2. What the hidden message in this exercise says.

One of the complaints we had about our Contact Tiddlers when we initially created them was that you couldn't see any of the fields on them without clicking on the info button. Remedy that by adding a section to the JaneDoe tiddler titled Information about Jane, containing a bulleted list or table that shows Jane's email address, phone number, family members, and manager.

Visit Jane Doe's tiddler and review the family and manager fields. These fields refer to several people who don't have tiddlers yet. Create those tiddlers, with all the appropriate metadata.

You can assume that John Doe and Emily Doe are also managed by Chris Smith (though managing three family members unrelated to you sounds like a disaster waiting to happen). Your choice of phone numbers and email addresses does not matter, provided they are in the correct formats.

Transclude a line into the text of Jane's tiddler that contains Chris Smith's phone number, in case she messes up so badly that you need to contact her manager immediately.

How would you make it so that it currently refers to Chris's phone number, but if the manager field is updated, the new manager's phone number will appear instead? (You might not be able to get this one, but at least spend some time thinking about it and experimenting before you look at the answer.)

Hint: Use a macro.

Modify the MeetingList so that only meetings that Jane attended are shown. Be careful not to exclude meetings that Jane attended along with other people.

Write a filter to find all meetings that are part of the OnboardingHr project or the TopSecretHr project and were attended by Jane.

In an exercise in the Searching section, we noted that a search for JohnDoe did not find places where John was mentioned somewhere other than the text field. Write and test a filter that finds mentions of John in any field.

Search for JohnDoe. Do you notice anything about the results? What's there, and what's missing?

Create another data tiddler called UsHolidaysJson using the same data in a JSON format, and change your TodaysHoliday tiddler to look the holiday up in there instead. Everything should continue to work the same way on the transclusion side. The table looks like this in JSON:

{
  "01/01": "New Year's Day",
  "07/04": "Independence Day",
  "10/31": "Halloween",
  "12/25": "Christmas Day"
}

Create a tiddler JumpToTiddler that has an input field and a Go button. When the button is clicked, the tiddler named in the input field should open.

Hint: One of the attributes of the button widget we didn't discuss here will help.

One more step with the divs. In order to get them formatted correctly, we need to be able to identify each of them separately. The way we do this in HTML/CSS is by applying a class (that is, assigning a value to the class attribute of the HTML tag). Adjust the wikitext so that each div has a class. It's a good idea to prefix the class names with your initials and a -, or some similar convention – this will ensure that you don't inadvertently pick the same class name that TiddlyWiki's core or a plugin does and mess up the formatting somewhere else on the page.

There's a problem with this pattern that we've been using throughout this section to create a list of links to tiddlers:

<$list filter="a filter">
  <<currentTiddler>>
</$list>

The problem is that if the name of the currentTiddler has a space in it, it is not linked. The only reason the results have displayed correctly so far is that they're in CamelCase and as such are linked automatically.

To explicitly create internal links, as we alluded to back in Widgets, we can use the $link widget:

<$link to="Tiddler Name to Link To">Text of the Link</$link>

Add a space to the title of one of your meeting tiddlers, so you can see the problem, then modify the MeetingList you created in Ex:BulletedMeetingList, using the $link widget to fix this problem.

Hint: <<currentTiddler>> will get replaced in more places than you might think.

Add an excerpt for each link – in other words, grab the first 200 characters of each tiddler and show it under the title. This will help us remind us what the tiddler is about, if the title wasn't chosen carefully enough.

We can accomplish this by wikifying the tiddler – that is, processing the HTML, transclusions, and wikitext in it as if we were displaying the tiddler – and then taking just the beginning portion of it. Here's a partially completed macro you can use to get an excerpt from a tiddler. Your task is to figure out what goes in the filter transclusion (to convert the full text of the tiddler to just its first 200 characters), then call the macro from an appropriate location.

\define excerptify(title)
  <$wikify name=wikitext text={{$title$}}>
    <$text text={{{ ??? }}} />...
  </$wikify>
\end

Hint: The split[] filter operator with nothing in the square brackets can be used to split incoming text into individual characters. You may need to review the filter operators documentation.

In general, if we reference ChrisSmith in the manager field of the JaneDoe tiddler, Jane does not show up as a backlink in ChrisSmith's Backlinks tab on the info page, because Backlinks shows only links in the text field. However, now we have a link in the text since we have transcluded the value of the manager field into the text. So now that we have a link, we should have a reference back to JaneDoe from ChrisSmith.

Test this hypothesis by looking in the Backlinks tab of ChrisSmith. What did you find? Why might this be?

Modify the answer to the previous exercise so that the value of the text attribute to the $wikify widget is in quotation marks. What happens? Why do you think this is?

If you haven't already done so, take a look at each of the tabs discussed above in your sample wiki.

Rather than create a macro for the first version of the Wikipedia link functionality, one might think we could simply use a variable and stick the variable reference immediately next to the article name:

<$set name="wikipedia" value="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/">
    <<wikipedia>>Aardvark
</$set>

Try putting this snippet in a tiddler. What happens? Why do you think this might happen?

Rewrite the example in The $macrocall widget can take variables as parameters to call a macro animalLinkText to get the value of the linkText parameter to the wikipediaLink macro. In other words, replace the <<linktext>> variable that's currently there with a macro.

The animalLinkText macro should take a letter as a parameter and output the text An animal which begins with {LETTER}, where {LETTER} is the parameter passed. Update the example to display the appropriate link text for each of the three animals.

Try referring to the wikipediaLink macro before defining it. What happens? What about if you put some arbitrary text before the macro definition that doesn't include a call to wikipediaLink?

Implement a mail merge in TiddlyWiki. Without writing JavaScript, you cannot actually send emails from TiddlyWiki, but you can produce a list of mailto: links that, when clicked, each open a new email in your email program with the email address, subject, and body for that recipient pre-filled. For low-volume tasks, this might be good enough.

On the tiddler that implements the merge, you should be able to fill in fields that provide a filter for contact tiddlers you want to send the message to, and some kind of template tiddler that uses a variable or a setting of the current tiddler to substitute in values that change.

You'll need to URL-encode the subject and body and put it into the link, which TiddlyWiki has a encodeuri[] filter operator to do. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mailto for details of the mailto: URI structure; essentially, you want to produce links that look like this:

mailto:whoever@example.com?subject=TheSubject&body=TheBodyOfTheEmail

…where both TheSubject and TheBodyOfTheEmail are URL-encoded.

Warning: This is well known in the community as a complex task that demands excellent knowledge of macros, filters, transclusions, and how they relate. It is harder than it looks, and even experienced users will find it challenging. That said, it's a great final exercise after reading this book, and it feels good to crack it!

Hint: You will need the $wikify widget.

Figure out what tiddler and field the main search box in the sidebar is bound to.

Find the wikipediaLink and ticketLink macros we created in the The Finer Points of Macros section and turn them into global macros, creating one or more system tiddlers under a user folder to house them (e.g., you could put both in $:/yournamehere/LinkMacros, or put one in $:/yournamehere/macros/Wikipedia).

Remove the original macro definitions from the individual tiddlers and try calling the macros from a few different tiddlers to make sure it works.

We chose to use a field to keep track of employees' managers. List at least two other ways we could have chosen to do this, and some advantages and disadvantages of each.

What happens if you add a suffix that doesn't have any meaning to a filter operator, such as tag or title?

Put the MeetingInformationTemplate on meetings globally as well.

Modify the MeetingList so that it does not use the variable reference <<currentTiddler>> but has identical functionality.

Hint: Try transcluding a field.

Create several more meeting tiddlers under the OnboardingHr tag, then try dragging and dropping them around using the tag pill list. Have the OnboardingProcess tiddler open as you do so, so you can see the effects on the table of contents.

Repeat the previous exercise using a <<list-links-draggable>> macro of the form described in this section, inserted within the OnboardingHr tiddler.

Create a tiddler named Today and put a set of vertically arranged tabs on it showing all meetings that are happening on the current day (i.e., whose at field describes any time today) and excluding drafts.

Don't worry if everything doesn't show up right – we'll talk about why that is and how to fix it in the exercises to follow. You're done with this exercise if you can get the correct set of tabs to appear in the list.

• You can get today's date with the built-in now macro, like <<now YYYY0MM0DD0hh>>. (If you're wondering why we include the hours, we'll discuss the potential for day rollover when at negative UTC offsets in Working with Dates.)
• You'll need to look up several new filter operators in the list.

Create a new tiddler called JaneTransclusion. Transclude the content of the JaneDoe tiddler here – but without writing the text {{JaneDoe}} anywhere in the tiddler. Once you do this successfully, find at least one other way to do it. (The answer will show you seven ways that use only tools we've already seen, so there is no shortage of options.)

Tip: If the information about Jane ends up all in one line, try adding some blank lines to your wikitext.

Come up with some new sections that would be useful to have on the More sidebar tab and add them in.

Move the contact information above the rest of the tiddler's body, rather than below it.

What happens if you transclude a tiddler that contains transclusions?

Identify a wiki you could imagine yourself creating, then write a set of naming conventions for it. These should include:

• How exactly titles should be capitalized, including how acronyms and other weirdnesses will be handled.
• Whether you use CamelCase titles, and if so, what you do if there's only one word or it otherwise doesn't match the capitalization rules required to create a link.
• Any special rules that seem appropriate (e.g., names of sources end with their publication date or the word Source).

You can refer to the naming conventions for my Zettelkasten for an example.

Dig up some old notes you've written for yourself, in any format, and identify:

• How you would divide them into tiddlers (we'll talk more about this later, but you know enough to take a crack at it now).
• What you would title each of those tiddlers.

Consider the following code:

<$set name="variable" value="1">
    <<variable>>
    <$set name="variable" value="2">
        <<variable>>
    </$set>
    <<variable>>
</$set>

What do you think happens at each reference to <<variable>>? Check your answers by pasting this into a new tiddler.

Create a button that creates a new contact. The created tiddler should contain the four fields we've been using, email, family, manager, and phone, but empty ready for the user to fill in; it should also have a title of New Contact and be tagged with Contact.

Create a similar button for a new meeting. The at field should be populated with the current time in the standard TiddlyWiki date/time format, down to the minute (i.e., the seconds and milliseconds should be zero).

Create and customize a new wiki for some purpose, whether it's useful for you or not. Some ideas that might get you thinking about different ways to organize data:

• A mini-encyclopedia for a topic you know a lot about.
• A recipe book.
• A place to plan a book or other large creative project.
• A catalog for your music or book collection.

What do you think happens if you use the title constructor to add a tiddler that does not exist to the pipeline?

Check your answer by running a filter in TiddlyWiki.

Use the list-before field to make the OnboardingPeople tiddler appear first in the table of contents you created within the OnboardingProcess tiddler in the previous section.

In the stylesheet I provided, you may have noticed there is a macro call: <<colour muted-foreground>>. This macro is used to retrieve a color from the palette. The benefit is that if you change the palette of your wiki, the color of the excerpt text will change to something appropriate as well.

Find the definition of the colour macro and figure out how the CSS color value (it'll be a # and six numbers and letters) is retrieved.

Change the filter in Ex:BypassSecurityWithTextSubstitution so that it is not vulnerable to this kind of manipulation. (Of course, the user could still just edit the tiddler and remove the authentication altogether. TiddlyWiki is not a suitable environment when users need to have limited access.)

To create a pretty external link where the text differs from the URL, we can use the syntax [[text|http://example.com]]. Update the wikipediaLink macro to output a link that looks like Wikipedia: Aardvark.

Explain what is potentially problematic about each of these tiddler names:

1. Company Entry Doors
2. Windows
3. Tiddlywiki
4. VisitingTheDMV
5. Onboarding: Office chair selection

None of these are necessarily wrong – although they might be depending on your naming conventions – but they each exhibit a possible danger we discussed above.

What happens if you remove the $let widget and the stateTiddlerName variable from the above example and call qualify once every time that the name of the tiddler is needed?

Take the example The $macrocall widget can take variables as parameters and modify it so that the inner macro calls are surrounded in quotation marks, like so:

\define wikipediaLink(articleName, linkText)
[[$linkText$|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$articleName$]]
\end

<$macrocall $name="wikipediaLink" linkText="<<linktext>>" articleName="Aardvark" />

What happens? Why do you think this happened?

Return to the Employee Information System tiddler and create a new knowledge tiddler for the Really Annoying Five-Factor Authentication Process. Use your imagination on what's involved!

Review what you wrote about the RAFFAP.

• Did you write about anything or anyone you already have a tiddler for, and thus should link to?
• Are there any new concepts that should have their own tiddlers (or at least missing links)?
• Are there other contexts you would expect to want to retrieve the RAFFAP in which would suggest you should add certain tags to it?

Update what you wrote accordingly.

Search for all tiddlers that currently contain global macros. Remember that most of these will be stored in shadow tiddlers, so you'll need to say you want to filter on shadow tiddlers to get any results.

Spend a few minutes browsing through some of the tiddlers that come up and looking at some of the system macro definitions. You'll recognize some of the macros from previous chapters, and you should be able to understand a good portion of what's going on. There's no magic – the built-in macros are simply wrapping up some complicated HTML and widgets for us to use in a convenient way, just like we would do when writing our own macros.

You'll have to edit each shadow tiddler to look at the definitions. Just click the discard-changes button when you're done so you don't mess anything up!

Write a filter to find all tiddlers that do not link to a tiddler that has a tag which is both red and begins with the letter C, sorted by title in reverse alphabetical order.

Consider a “red” tag to be one with a color code of #ff0000, as in Classifying Tags.

English is terrible at expressing complicated conditions like this, so to be sure you read it right, here's the sentence decomposed hierarchically and written more precisely:

• All tiddlers matching these criteria:
  • The tiddler does not link to:
    • Another tiddler:
      • That has a tag:
        • Which is red (#ff0000)
        • The name of which begins with a capital letter C
• Sorted by title in reverse alphabetical order.

Tip 1: The prefix operator returns items from its input whose title begins with a given string of text.

Tip 2: The is[] filter step will find all (non-shadow) tiddlers in the wiki.

A quick way to test your answer is to add a link from a tiddler that appears in the output to any contact; the tiddler should disappear from the list since it's now linking to a tiddler that has a red tag whose name begins with C.

Write a filter to find all tiddlers tagged with red tags. Make sure you figure out Ex:TagMetadataStorage first, or you won't have much luck.

Hint: Review the Tags section of Common Filter Operators.

Create a JavaScript macro called roundtime that rounds a TiddlyWiki-formatted timestamp to the nearest 15 minutes.

Locate a rubber duck or another appropriate object you can explain your TiddlyWiki problems to, and find the problem(s) with the following filter snippet by explaining to your chosen listener what it's doing. Check your answer by fixing the problem.

The goal of this filter is to display, in alphabetical order, the summaries of all tiddlers in this chapter, which are stored in their description fields.

<$list filter="[all[tiddlers+shadows]tag[Section]field;parent[Filtering and Formatting]sort[]get[description]">
  <<currentTiddler>><br>
</$list>

Search the web to find the name of TiddlyWiki's original developer.

Try searching for a few more tiddlers you've created, both with keywords found in the title and keywords found in the body text.

In an exercise in the previous chapter, we observed that tiddlers referenced in fields did not appear in search. Now, however, we have transcluded these fields directly into the JaneDoe tiddler. Try searching for some of the text again (e.g., ChrisSmith). Has anything changed?

You may have noticed, as you completed the above exercise, that the list of items that have the page controls tag is quite a lot longer than the buttons that currently appear on the toolbar. Explore your wiki to figure out how the buttons are selectively shown or hidden.

What happens if you transclude a tiddler into itself?

Locate several places in your sample wiki where you have used $set widgets and replace them with equivalent $let widgets.

Locate several places in your sample wiki where you have used $set widgets and replace them with equivalent $vars widgets.

You might be tempted to use [tag<currentTiddler>] within the tabs macro on the $:/yourname/Views tiddler, so that if you ever change the name of the tiddler you don't have to remember to update the filter. Try this. What happens? Why do you think this happened?

Locate some old notes you've taken, or simply consider a topic or problem you've been thinking about recently. What are the important nouns in this topic? How would you divide it into tiddlers, what fields would they have, and how would they relate to each other? You can stub out a few tiddlers in your sample wiki, or simply sketch an outline of the tiddlers on a sheet of paper.

Edit a few sections and tiddlers in the Grok TiddlyWiki wiki to get a feel for how it's divided into tiddlers and what fields are present on these tiddlers. Tiddlers are transcluded into other tiddlers using a syntax involving {{double curly braces}}; don't worry if you see things in the source that don't make sense yet.

What happens if you put a space in a variable name?

StretchText, generally attributed to Ted Nelson, is a form of hypertext in which links, or summary snippets, can be expanded in place: in other words, you can “stretch” parts of the text that you want to see in more detail to zoom in on them. Implement stretch-text in TiddlyWiki using a template or macro that allows you to expand and contract a tiddler serving as the “next level down”.

You can find an example and a TiddlyWiki implementation as the TiddlyStretch plugin in my list of cynical laws in my Zettelkasten.

If you know a little bit of CSS, read about Stylesheets in TiddlyWiki and make some design changes to your wiki, like changing the text color or the shape of some buttons.

Go back through some of the macros you have written for previous exercises in this chapter and see if you can find any opportunities to switch from text substitution to <<__parameter-transclusion__>>.

Tip: Try searching for the word define to find tiddlers that contain macro definitions.

Modify the display of tags in the Tags section of the More sidebar tab so that they are grouped by color.

Set the tags corresponding to tiddler types (Contact, Journal, Meeting, and Project) to solid red (#ff0000) and give them a tag icon ($:/core/images/tag-button).

How do you think the color and icon of tags are stored?

Suppose we want to create a link for a contact which, when clicked on a smartphone, calls the contact. This can be accomplished with a link to a URL like tel:888-555-1234. Create such a link and add it to the ContactInformationTemplate.

If you want to use a [[double square brackets]] link rather than an a HTML element, you need to use ext, like this:

[ext[tel:888-555-1234]]

That's because tel:888-555-1234 by itself would be a valid name for a tiddler, too, so if TiddlyWiki isn't told it's an external link, it will assume it's an internal one. See the External Links heading here in the TiddlyWiki documentation for more information.

Write a macro called ticketLink that takes one parameter, called ticketId, and creates a link whose text is Ticket #{ID}, where {ID} represents the ID of the ticket, and which links to the ticket. Assume that the URL of a ticket in the company's ticket-tracking system is https://tix.example.com/ticket/{ID}.

Test this macro by putting it at the top of the OnboardingProcess tiddler and calling it at the bottom of the tiddler with the ticket number in the ticketnum field of that tiddler as its argument.

In the TicketTrackingLink exercise, we created a macro that outputs a link to a ticket in the company's ticket-tracking system and placed it in the OnboardingProcess tiddler. Create a template based on this macro, called TicketNumberLink, which displays the link to a project's ticket when it's used as a template for any tiddler that has the ticketnum field populated. Transclude this template in the text of the OnboardingProcess project to show its ticket number.

Tip: It may be helpful to get everything working within the OnboardingProcess tiddler first, then excise the relevant parts into a separate template tiddler – this way, if something doesn't work, you have a better idea of what part isn't right.

Create a list of all tiddlers that contain the title of the wiki.

• The current title of the wiki can be found in the tiddler named $:/SiteTitle.
• The search filter operator is used to find tiddlers that contain some arbitrary text.

Make up and create another meeting under one of the other subcategories, either OnboardingPeople or OnboardingTraining. Be sure to include at least one participant and a time as we did when we set up the initial meeting. Check to make sure that it shows up in the table of contents.

Having the word Onboarding appear repeatedly in a table of contents within the OnboardingProcess tiddler seems a little silly, especially when those top-level tiddlers don't have any useful content of their own. We'd really like to be able to give them names that make sense in this context, without having to make the title of the tiddler something vague like “HR” that would be ambiguous in the context of the entire wiki.

Fortunately for us, the table-of-contents functionality looks for a field called caption and uses that instead of the title if it exists. Add appropriate caption fields to each of the three top-level items displayed in the table of contents to pretty up the list.

There are two more (rarely used) kinds of tables of contents, toc-tabbed-internal-nav and toc-tabbed-external-nav. Try these out. Can you figure out the difference between them?

In The Finer Points of Macros, we learned that the scope of a macro is until the end of the tiddler. But what about when we transclude a tiddler containing a macro into another tiddler?

Take the example The $macrocall widget can take variables as parameters and modify it so that the $macrocall tags are unclosed (no / before the >). What happens? Why do you think this happened?

Suppose that corporate decides it's time to update the disclaimer, and henceforth all documents need to say "doesn't" instead of "does not." Update the tiddler to make this change. Notice that, with the use of a variable, you need only make the change in one place, even if you included the disclaimer in hundreds of places.

What happens if you refer to a variable after the </$set>?

What happens if you set a variable in one tiddler, and transclude a tiddler that references that variable within the scope of the $set widget? You can start with a Tiddler 1 that looks something like this:

<$set name="myVariable" value="test">
    {{Tiddler 2}}
</$set>

The TodaysHoliday tiddler has a problem: if today isn't a holiday, it says "It's today!". While true, that sounds a little silly, doesn't it? Change the tiddler so that if today is not a holiday, it instead says, "Sadly, it's a very ordinary day today."

Hint 1: If you don't remember how to make some wikitext appear only if a condition is met, have another read through Text Substitution.

Hint 2: An attribute called emptyMessage will come in handy.

Try right-clicking on this web page and choosing “View Page Source” (this option might be called “View Frame Source” on some versions of TiddlyDesktop). This will show the HTML code behind the page. Scroll through some of it and see if you can find some tags and attributes, like we discussed above.

In addition to HTML, you will find some JavaScript (a programming language for web browsers that uses a lot of {curly braces}), some CSS (a language that defines the colors, spacing, and fonts used on the site), some TiddlyWiki wikitext, and probably a few other mysterious things. When you see something you don't understand, just keep scrolling – you're not meant to understand it all, just to get a feel for how a website's HTML looks.

For fun, go try this on a couple of other websites, too.

Change the ViewTemplate tiddler that displays the contact information template so that it does not display if the hide-contactinfo field on the contact tiddler has the value yes. Use a $list widget.

Repeat the previous exercise, but use a $reveal widget instead of a $list widget.

Place the new $:/yourname/Views tiddler onto the sidebar between the Recent and Tools tabs.

Hint: You'll have to figure out how TiddlyWiki picks up tabs on the sidebar. A little bit of detective work right within your wiki should be sufficient; we've seen all the relevant mechanisms by now.

Create a tiddler called WikiStatistics that shows the following pieces of information in a bulleted list:

• How many contacts are in the wiki.
• How many unique tiddlers are linked from meetings. (It will be unique without having to do anything special, so don't panic if you think you don't know how to make it unique.)
• What percentage of non-system tiddlers in the wiki are contacts, to three digits of precision (e.g., 10.2%, or 1.55%).

To complete the last one, you'll need to review the list of Mathematics Operators on the filter operators manual page.

Add the following snippet to a new tiddler:

\define wikipediaLink(articleName)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$articleName$
\end

<$macrocall $name="wikipediaLink" articleName={{!!wikipedia-article}}/>

Alter this snippet so the contents of the wikipedia-article field on the current tiddler can be a transclusion of a different tiddler field. (As it stands, the transclusion will render, but not as part of a link, since the transclusion within the wikipedia-article field is only seen after being returned from the macro.)

Create a snippet Link to Wikipedia article that inserts a call to the wikipediaLink global macro. Specifically, it should use the prefix/suffix feature so that if you highlight Aardvark, you get <<wikipediaLink "Aardvark" linktext>>.

Make the solution of the previous exercise into a separate WikipediaLinkTemplate tiddler that can be transcluded, so that it can be used for creating links to more things than just aardvarks. As we learned in Ex:VariableTransclusion, variable values will carry across transclusion boundaries, so refer to the value of a variable called articleName to decide what article to link to.

While you're at it, make this template more robust by getting the value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki from another tiddler; this way, we can reference the base URL of Wikipedia from other places, and only have to update it in one place if it changes.

In Ex:MacroAdjacency within the Macros section, we found that this attempt to use a simple variable instead of a macro to compose a Wikipedia link didn't work:

<$set name="wikipedia" value="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/">
    <<wikipedia>>Aardvark
</$set>

We now have the tools needed to accomplish this without a macro. Your solution should display a link to the Aardvark article which has been built from the wikipedia variable shown above and the constant part Aardvark, but without using a macro.

• You will need the filter operator addsuffix.
• You'll need to use the HTML tag a, which creates an anchor, including a link. The form of this tag is as follows:

<a href="the URL">the link text</a>