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While I'm waiting for the dust on Instiki's SQLite back-end to settle, I've been doing some front end work for Pimki. First order of the day: better todo display (the other major todo upgrade - making them checkable - depends too much on the storage mechanism).

The most visible change is that the combined Todo view now comes in two flavours: plain list and quadrant view. There is a full documentation in the help section, BTW.

The Enhancements

You can now set a few properties on the todo items, besides context. The full syntax is:

 todo@context{importance: high, due_date: Dec 23}: buy chrissy prezzies

This allows you to break your tasks into both urgency (when) and importance levels. Other properties will be ignored for the moment. One property that I'll add soon is status, for marking the items as complete. Still need some thoughts about how this should be handled (re display, archiving, etc).

An additional enhancement is that todo items now automatically pick up the enclosing page categories as their context. So if you have a todo@home on page with category:garage listed, the context for that todo is both home and garage.

The List View

The list view is basically the same as before, tweaked for better display. You can sort the display by name, dates or importance. You can limit the list of displayed items by context. Each item will link back to the page/entry it is set on.

The Quadrant View

This is inspired by The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The idea behind it is that we tend to do important and urgent things first, then move to urgent but not important tasks. Instead, more time should be given to important but less urgent tasks (read this for a bit discussion). This view will collect all the todo items and display them in a table for easy reference on what should be done next.

Currently, the urgency horizon is set at 1 week: if it's due before then it's urgent, otherwise it's not.

Under the Hood

Under the hood I've split the Bliki and the Task Tracker into their own controllers. As a testament to the 10x hype with rails this exercise took about 10 minutes per controller, and I ended up with more tests. What I did was use script/generate to create the new controller, then copy over the relevant methods and tests from the Wiki controller to the new one. I added the necessary routes entries, changed a bit of the action names and run the tests. It didn't take long to make everything in the tests pass. I then grep the code to find all the things I haven't changed, added tests (that failed) and fixed the code. So overall the result is better (I hope :).

As I edit the templates and controllers, I also try to modernise the code. Taking advantage of all the built-in Rails functionality makes Pimki less of hack and a lot easier to manage in the long run.

Next steps

The next things on the list are to streamline the Bliki interface and complete the (AJAX heavy) Task-Tracker front end.

If you are interested in checking Pimki2 while under development, read my last post on how to. Short version: export existing, download, unzip, stop old, start new, import, play. Just don't use it for mission critical data yet :-)