Conversations
Querki isn't just a plain database: it is designed to make it easier to collaborate on your data, working with the other members of this Space to understand it and make it better. One of the ways it does that is with Conversations.
Conversations are like comment threads in something like Facebook, but a bit more powerful. (They will gradually become much more powerful: only the very beginnings of Conversations have been implemented yet.) You can have as many Conversations on each Thing as you like, not just one.
In our ongoing example, let's say that Martin (the owner of this Space) has never heard of Fealty before I added it to the Space. He wants to know more, so he looks at the bottom of the page, the Comments section:
He clicks on "Start a new Conversation", and types up his question:
He presses the "Post Comment" button, and the new Comment shows up:
How do I know that he asked the question? Because I get a Notification.
Tangent: Turning on Notifications
At the moment, you don't automatically get Comment Notifications unless you own the Space. If you want to hear about it whenever someone posts a comment, you need to turn it on by going to the Advanced page from the Actions Menu:
That shows the Advanced Page, which has a few things on it. The relevant one lets you choose whether you want Notifications or not:
Press "Yes" and give it a while -- like it says, it may take a few hours before you begin to get Notifications about comments.
This has proven to be a bit of a hassle, so expect it to change in the not-too-distant future.
Assuming I have Notifications turned on, I will see new comments because the Notifications Icon will light up. The Notifications Icon is in the top menu bar, and normally looks like an empty (black) bell:
After Martin posts his comment, the Notifications icon will light up to tell me that I have one new Notification:
I click on the bell, which takes me to the Notifications Page:
There is Martin's comment, at the top of the list because it is the newest. Notice the green arrow next to the title of his comment -- if I click on that, I get taken directly to it, on the Fealty page:
I click on "Click here to Reply...", and get a box to type into:
I type in my reply to him, the same way he typed in the original comment:
Notice that my reply isn't just plain text -- that bit with the square brackets and parentheses is QText, which is how you do fancier things in comments and Large Text fields in Querki. (For the technical crowd: QText is a dialect of Markdown. A lot has been changed, but the most-common functions mostly work the same.)
We'll discuss QText in more detail in the second section of this guide, but for now just note that this particular example is showing how you put an HTML link into the text: the square brackets say what text to display, and the parentheses say where this link should go to.
I press the Post Comment button, and my reply shows up:
Conversations are a quick and easy way to work together on your Space. I encourage you to use them freely: they are one of Querki's more useful little features.
And that's it for the basics of Querki. There is a lot more to it, but you've already learned all the most important parts: how to work in a Space, add and edit Things, and collaborate with other people in the Space.
