This is currently closed internal documentation for popcorn. Eventually it'll be refactored into use for public editing of the popcorn client/system.

You can also return to my website here.

Six releases to 1.0, each named after a U.S. city that claims to be “Popcorn Capital of the World;” You can click on the name to see the features added from that release.

1. Ridgway 0.1: Initial release, minimalist feature set.
2. Van Buren 0.2: TBD.
3. Schaller 0.3: TBD.
4. Valparaiso 0.5: TBD.
5. Marion 0.7: TBD.
6. North Loup 0.9: By this point, final feature addition and stress testing.

popcorn is deployed as two distinct projects that work together: The client, which runs locally on your desktop PC, and the server, which runs on a machine that is exposed to the internet. The model used is thin client, thick server. The client has very little responsibility, and almost all the work is done on the server. Communication is done over http requests through Wordpress' REST API, and mostly it is client sending pull requests on the server for updates. This is not the lowest overhead approach, but it does offer a lot of flexibility and ease of implementation.

Conceptually popcorn works on a very simple model of: things, groups, and classes.

• Things: One object of interesting inside the system. It is marked with an 64-bit integer ID, equal to the order in which is was introduced to the system. For ease of use this ID is usually a 1-16 character wide ascii hexadecimal string. Internally though, it is an 64-bit unsigned integer. Besides it's ID a thing has also: string DATA of unknown type, a CLASS - itself both a thing and an index into the class reference, BORN a timestamp of when the item was born. IDs are never reused, and only increment. Eventually all the grains of sands will be expended and the system will fail, for example: 10,000 users adding 10,000 messages a day can only do so for 505,044,327 years.
• Groups: A group is a Thing (with all that entails: ID, DATA, CLASS) that can 'hold' other Things. In implementations this means a group is a thing that denotes a table of references to other things it holds.
• Classes: A special kind of group that goes in a special class reference table. What makes it special: everything in the system has a class tag. Classes, as in object-oriented programming, can be derived from one another. Think: USER → MODERATOR → ADMIN, in this case ADMIN is a subclass of MODERATOR, and in turn a subclass of USER.

popcorn uses a specific subset/extension of Markdown it calls MarkedDown. In general, most of what you'd expect to work in Markdown does just that:

Only the #<space> format is supported. Underlining is not supported. Headings are limited to 5 depth, and are truncated at that point if longer.

Messages without a line-break (an empty message) are merged into a paragraph. You if you type: 'Hello,<enter>' that sends Hello, and then type: 'friend.<enter>' the messages will merge to become: 'Hello, friend.' Technical note: The client merges them into one on display, the server sees multiple messages. If you want to insert a line-break after a message, then you can either add a backslash at the end of a line or press ctrl+enter on the client.

Asterisks denote emphasis (and only asterisks). One is italic, two bold, three italic and bold.

To start a denoted, indented blockquote, start a paragraph with >(space). The formatting will continue until the next linebreak. Most formatting works under blockquotes. Nesting is not currently supported, but likely will be added.

Unordered lists are marked line by line with -(space) at the start. Ordered lists are marked with .(space). The first line without a - or . will start a new paragraph.

Every four spaces are one indent. Tab is not support and are stripped from content. Clients will create 4 spaces from the tab key.

Images (and later: Media) can be inserted as one message. The message must begin with !(space) and then a reference to the media is provided. This reference can be a URI/URL, or a reference into the server if it supports storing images. Any text following that is treated as a caption for the image.

Lines that begin with a dash - and have three or more such dashes in a row are considered a horizontal rule. Optional text following this code describes how to draw the rule.

Links can just be added as they appear with <> formatting: <https://popcorn.wishray.com>, or in [(display)](url/uri) format.