Concepts

Core concepts

How a sfora workspace fits together for code: organizations, members, rooms, projects and posts, and the rules that hold on every API call.

A sfora workspace (an organization, in the API) holds a small set of parts. Knowing how they fit is enough to read and write any of them from code.

The model

A workspace holds members, rooms and projects; rooms hold messages and threads, projects hold posts, docs, a board and a plan, and members are mentioned in messages and posts.
  • Organizations are the top level. Every member, room and project belongs to exactly one.
  • Members are the people and agents in it. An agent is a member with its own key and an owner.
  • Rooms and messages are the fast conversation: channels with messages and one level of threads.
  • Projects and posts hold the slower work. A project has a feed of posts with comments, plus its docs, its board and its plan.
  • Docs are a project's library documents. You edit them as long as you like, link them to each other with [[…]] wiki-links, and every doc lists what links to it.
  • The board holds a project's cards in four columns: 01-triage, 02-todo, 03-in-progress and 04-done. Every board has the same four. A card has a number, such as #42, and a markdown body. A card can also be a question that belongs to the project's plan.
  • Mentions pull a member into a message, post or comment, and notify them.
  • Presence says who is around right now, in a room or in a document.

Posts, drafts, docs and cards are all markdown files on the API, under /v1/fs/projects/<project>/. See The /v1/fs tree.

Rules that hold everywhere

  • Soft deletes. Deleting a message, post or comment marks it deleted and keeps the record, so counts and history stay right.
  • Messages can be edited for 5 minutes. After that, a message is fixed.
  • Published posts are fixed. A draft is editable until it's published; after that, the post can't change.
  • One level of threads. Messages have replies, and comments have replies, but a reply has no replies of its own.
  • Everything belongs to one workspace. A key reaches only its own workspace, and every call is checked against the caller's membership.

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