Question: is there a place for asking questions?

[zblesk]

Hello,

is there any place where I can ask questions regarding Joplin development?
I'm new to this stack and could use some pointers, but even though I've been crawling up and down the repo and website for the last few days, I haven't found any. Is there some forum, or discord, or whatever?

Thanks a lot!
(Also, sorry for opening this as an issue. Though it could be considered an issue with the docs, I guess. 😇 )

[foxmask]

At the beginning, when I installed the project some times ago, I had the same question, but I think Laurent is all alone to dev. So patience is the master world, for him and the project :)

[zblesk]

Well, hopefully he swings by anyway. :D

[foxmask]

I think you'll see the white wolf soon :)

[alwashe]

You just asked a question. 😊

[tessus]

A place for asking questions (not only about development) would be great.

As a matter of fact I have about 20 of them (dev and non-dev), but what is the legitimate way to ask them?

• Send Laurent an email?
• Open one ticket for all questions?
• Open one ticket per question?

[zblesk]

Opening an "issue" because I have a question feels wrong to me. I would have gone with the e-mail, but I couldn't find any. :D

[alwashe]

Google Play Store -> Joplin - > Ende of Page -> Send Mail

Why not here?

[tessus]

@zblesk well, that depends on the developer's workflow. It also makes the issue tracker a single source of information.

e.g. I don't mind people asking me questions in the issue tracker for my projects. I mark such an issue as question and ask the poster to close it, when they think I answered it sufficiently.
I don't mind getting emails either, but in a lot of cases the question, and more importantly the answer would be of high interest to others, thus opening a ticket or a post in a forum makes this information available to others.

[laurent22]

I've been meaning to open some place for user support because it's true GitHub is not the best for this. The issue tracker is mostly for bug and feature reports.

Any suggestion on what would a good platform for user support? Is Discord any good? Ideally it should be something reasonably open (so not Slack) and easy to use.

[foxmask]

there is https://www.discourse.org/ used by vuejs and apistar for example.
you can have a look at the demo

[tessus]

Discourse seems like a good choice. Previously a lot of people used phpBB as a forum platform, but lately most of new forum installs are Discourse.
The recommended way is to do the install via Docker, which takes less than 20 minutes. You don't want to manually install all the requirements a Ruby on Rails app actually needs. ;-)

[laurent22]

Thanks, I see the project might be eligible for free hosted Discourse so I'm going to try to apply for it.

[zblesk]

Good luck with the Discourse application. Joplin doesn't quite meet the requirements, but they seem to be flexible in this.
Discord is also good, but more similar to Slack than to a standard forum. (So great for things like brainstorming or support, less so for any 'knowledge-base'-like articles.)

[laurent22]

Yes maybe both a Dicord (for chat) and Discourse (for more permanent stuff) would be good. The project indeed is a bit short in terms of contributors, but let's see if they allow it anyway.

[zblesk]

Sounds great.

In the meantime, until they're up, one of the questions I wanted to ask initially 😇 :

I'd like to hack on Joplin a bit, but I have never used this stack. I'd managed to build the windows app, but I have no idea what my workflow should be, or whether there are any specific tools that the community recommends.
I figure I could just try modifying files and then doing a yarn dist, but since that seems to take a long time, I hope there is some other way?

Second question: when I ran the instance that I built from source, it has shown all my notes. I'd like to have a separate set of notes for the version I'm currently hacking on. Is this possible?

Thanks!

[laurent22]

@zblesk, you indeed don't need to run yarn dist every time to test your app. Instead you can use run.sh in the ElectronClient directory. This will compile the JSX files, import the latest changes from the lib and run the app and should only take a few seconds.

This run.sh is setup with a dev environment so that it doesn't use your existing notes. In general, the app supports the following flags which are useful for debugging and development:

--env dev
--log-level debug
--open-dev-tools

[sbstn87]

Maybe matrix.org\Riot.im could be a better option than Discord? It is open source and federated, whereas Discord is proprietary software that collects all user data.

[tessus]

IMO a forum or discussion board is more useful than a chat system. Maybe I'm biased because I truly dislike IRC, but a forum gives you a chance to pin threads, add guides and FAQs in special read-only folders. With a forum it's easier for people to find a solution.

I'm not saying that a chat system shouldn't be considered but the main focus should be on a forum.

[foxmask]

Things like https://gitter.im allow us to exchange easily and follow the changes on issues etc, and for FAQ and other guides, there could be the place of https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/wiki

[laurent22]

The forum is now created and available at https://discourse.joplin.cozic.net (Discourse has eventually accepted free hosting for the project). I will link to it from the Readme and other places, it will be the official place for development-related questions and discussions and for user support.

[tessus]

What about ideas for feature requests and their discussions (e.g. if they make sense, how feasible they are, ...). Can we add them there too? Or shall feature requests be posted to github?

[tessus]

Oh, btw, any chance you can activate signup or login with a github account?

[laurent22]

@tessus, right that would make sense, I've added a "feature requests" category to discuss this. I will also enable GitHub login.

[tessus]

@laurent22 awesome, thanks

[laurent22]

GitHub login is now enabled on the forum.