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Requesting guidance – web app for philosophical treatise
Hi all,
My friend wants to write a philosophical treatise, and he has asked me to develop a web application to help him do this, and to share it when it’s finished. Essentially he wants a wiki, with a visual map of the connections between articles. Any guidance on this would be much appreciated.
Here are more details of how it would work – if you would prefer to see it in pictures, see the bottom of the post for a link. For his workflow he would like the ability to select text and contract or expand it into another article. Contracting would mean selecting a paragraph in the editor and making it into a new page of the wiki, whilst replacing that paragraph with a single link to that new page. Expanding is selecting a word and making it into the title of a new article, whilst turning it into a clickable link. He wants the visual map to update automatically as he carries out these types of operations, and be navigable a bit like a mind-map, but probably more complex.
I have done a one-year conversion degree in computing, some online courses and know three programming languages now – I think picking up necessary new ones/new technologies shouldn’t be too hard, and am happy to. I am not sure how much I may be overstretching myself with this project though.
Things we have been looking into so far are: extending Wiki.js for Node or making a Node app from scratch, Dracula graph library, and yFiles graph library (we may be able to persuade them to let us use it for free).
Here are a set of mockups which show basically how it would work. They are using Mac TextEdit as a basis but we would like to make a web app rather than a desktop application.
Thank you for your input!
