[emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: Making planner simpler

[Jody Klymak]

Hi Sacha,

> This impression is not helped by the fact that my website has a
> gazillion tasks and hyperlinks. 

It might be nice if there was an actual planner webpage.  Your site is
very entertaining, but hard to mine for information.  EmacsWiki is
also a glorious mess.  How about one of those web pages with "Intro",
"Getting Planner", "Screenshots", and "Resources".  It could, and
should, be edited by one or two people who have a clear idea what
Planner is all about.  New users would have something that was
succinct and easy to get started with.

> I'd like to make it easy to get started with planner. When people
> are used to (plan) as the last thing in their ~/.emacs, _then_ we
> show them all the other funky stuff, which is all optional
> anyway. Must make it clear that people happily use Planner without
> Gnus, without publishing, without plan pages, without hyperlinks,
> without remember, without detailed plans, etc...

What is the core functionality of planner?  I think it would be good
to have a planner mission statement.  And then base the code and
documentation around the "core", and the add-ons as "extras".  

Judging from your list of what is "extra" and what is not, there may
be a bit of discussion here.  I think the issue with planner is not
ease of use, but ease of finding information.  There is a manual,
which is pretty nice - it'd be nice if it was distributed as PDF?

> http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/PlannerModeMethods tries to be
> a step in the (right?) direction. What else can we do to make it
> easier?

People may want to read PLANNER-README.  I find PlannerModeMethods
somewhat esoteric and short on specifics.

> I'm thinking of turning off plan pages by default so that newbies
> don't have to worry about things like "TaskPool". 

People are worried about plan pages?  How so?  I find this a bizarre
idea!  

Cheers, Jody

-- 
Jody Klymak      http://opg1.ucsd.edu/~jklymak/
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