Share folder via link

The most convenient way for me to share something is via a link, but it looks like I can only get a link to share documents, not folders. Iā€™d like to be able to share entire folders via a link.

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Just a note on work load: itā€™s gonna require quite a bit work since the left pane is completely invisible to the anonymous visitor right now. Weā€™d need make sure it works fine for anonymous users to make folders shareable via link.

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I see. Thanks for letting me know!

What would really work well, at least for me, is Workflowy-style sharing any bullet point, instead of only files or folders. Then I wouldnā€™t need any of the file/folder complications and life would be that much easierā€¦

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I guess the only way to do that is to use WorkFlowy then, because Dynalist is built on folders and documents and we believe in them. Both have pros and cons but we value the pros of the folder/document structure more, as in it makes browsing and navigating much faster.

Plus folders and documents are universal to all operating systems, most people have a good handle of this concept. Although some people receive WorkFlowyā€™s model well, believe me there are a lot of people out there who cannot understand how to work with only one master document.

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I wasnā€™t trying to say I want folders/files to go away, but it would still be possible to have them while sharing individual bullet points, wouldnā€™t it?

So far, Iā€™ve found it difficult to stay organized with this model. Thatā€™s the reason I would like to share bullet points - to be able to share only the relevant piece of my Dynalist with someone without having to go and reorganize everything.

Were you saying that files/folders make navigating faster from a technical perspective (IE things load faster) or from a UI perspective (IE they make it easier for people to find things)?

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Itā€™s hard to imagine what would happen when we allow sharing bullet points right now. If you share a bullet called ā€œPointā€ under the document called ā€œDocumentā€ with someone, what happens on their side? We canā€™t just add ā€œPointā€ to their master list like WorkFlowy does since thereā€™s no such master list in Dynalist. The most plausible thing is probably to add a document called ā€œListā€ for them, but thatā€™s basically disrupting the sharing system, since itā€™s a document on one personā€™s end and an item on anotherā€™s. This makes the entire system harder to understand.

So far, I think only ex-WorkFlowy users have requested this feature. Itā€™s something thatā€™s not quite consistent with our model ā€“ itā€™s like sharing a paragraph in Google Docs. I can imagine it happening, but I donā€™t think many people would need it. Documents are the natural medium for sharing. If I want to share, Iā€™ll create a shared document.

Both. Obvious if you only load what you need, things would be faster. From the user interaction perspective, you can jump to a document and view them in the left pane without leaving where you are. These are only possible because of documents and folders. I can imagine a two-pane outliner that shows the overview on the left and you can open details on the right, and with a switch that lets you jump to any item, but itā€™s slower for switching to a high-level context, because you get a lot of matches from items deep down rather than higher up when you want them.

I hope the above makes sense.

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Thanks for explaining! As I get more used to Dynalist, Iā€™m sure itā€™ll be more intuitive how to organize to make sharing work smoothly.

Thanks for the understanding! Let me know if thereā€™s anything I can help with.

By the way, the document/folder system is not perfect yet, and there are lots of improvements that need to be done. A few examples: after dragging item to become document, you canā€™t drag them back; you canā€™t use keyboard shortcuts to manipulate files; canā€™t undo file deletion, etc. Thatā€™s probably another reason itā€™s hard to get used to it. Weā€™re sorry if thatā€™s the caseā€¦

I love that explanation :clap: :slight_smile: Brilliant ā€œvisualā€

I understand the problem of ā€œwhat to doā€ with a shared bullet. Would need a lot of work to make it so it goes into a new document or an existing one. One way would be to, at the point the other users wants to add it to their ā€œstuffā€, add it under a Shared folder in a document with the original name, and then the bullet(s) inside it.

Only reason Iā€™ve needed this in the past is when I have a larger document and would like to share only a sub-set of it without being ā€œforcedā€ to reorganize by making a new document. But to be honest, once i had set up my documents (mostly) and shared those ā€“ Iā€™m basically done.That ā€œworkaroundā€ works well for me although I wonā€™t vote ā€œnoā€ to having the bullet-sharing option :slight_smile:

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you havenā€™t replied yet to you other post, but it being universal & standard

is a pretty good reason ā€“ What are Dynalist's sharing philosophy and best practices?

  • i was curious to ask you if you had ever used any other softwares in your life thus far?

to compare this to workflowy

  • why would i want to share one part of the list?
  • when i can share the entire sheet?

obviously youā€™re gonna have one main topic/subject/goal on a sheet,

why in the universe would anyone have the discrete things to make a sheet unsharable?

iā€™ll like to know why

maybe it would be helpful/useful to me

maybe im doing everything not as good as i could

please tell me

Iā€™ll just chime in and say that for the sake of convenience, itā€™s nice to work on a document and include some part of it with different people. And you could include some unfinished parts in it to, and being able to not share it is useful.

Also, some users might put everything into one document and bookmark the bullet points, as @Yatharth_Agarwal suggested in another post. This makes Dynalist easier for users of Workflowy to use, and Iā€™ve done this myself. Although in a way it has backfired in that I havenā€™t touched the document sinceā€¦

Disclaimer: Iā€™m only a forum mod, I donā€™t touch the product design stuff.

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I agree: itā€™s infinitely useful.

I also understand the development logic problem of ā€œis it a list? a document?ā€ etc.

Maybe part of the problem, too, is that weā€™re talking about two kinds of sharing:

  1. Share as in collaborate: give someone access to my stuff and letā€™s edit together

  2. Share as in sending someone a link to something and thatā€™s it

[thinking]

Maybe bullets & documents need to be untied internally. With sharing the/a problem is ā€œif you share a bullet, how does it behave on the other side; as a doc? a bullet?ā€. And with moving bullets between lists the problem is that the URL of the bullet changes.

In both cases, if there is a look-up table for the bullets, then you look at in which document they goā€¦maybe that helps.

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I see folder and documents as ā€œskeuomorphic conceptsā€. There are no folders and documents in reality itā€™s simply a choice about how to represent an organization of information. But is also tends to create the same limitations in the minds of users (and developers it seems) causing us to try to find ways to drag parts of one outline from one document to another, etc.

To me it would be easier to mark an item as as document within the outline that makes it appear in the folder document hierarchy depending on itā€™s position within the entire structure. That way we get the superior navigation advantages of the document/folder pane without folders and documents becoming things to overcome in terms of managing them and moving information around between them. Just choose the scope in the left pane and work with information in the right pane. This would also eliminate the need for bookmarks which seem like a curious alternative flat navigation anyway.

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I have a document called ā€œRecipesā€ in which I store recipes that I come across or have developed over time, I have a set of tags such as #chicken #beef #asian #lowcarb #bbq #spicy #glutenfree, etc. which makes it easy for me to filter based on what I am in the mood for or have on hand. So to make the tags work I put them all in the same document. Bu then comes time to share a recipe I have to export and cannot create a permanent link to share. So it is not like sharing paragraph in Google Docs. Of course if Google Drive had tagging and the easy navigation and organization I would not be using an outlining tool such as Dynalist or Workflowy.

Ah I see!

Maybe this is a workaround: make the whole Recipe document shared. When you want to point someone to a recipe you can use the individual link for that recipe. Of course the person receiving the link can still browse around, so it depends on in which context you share.

I double-store recipes; I have them in Dynalist, all cleaned up and easy to use, and add its copy into Evernote. Evernote has tagging and easy sharing so maybe thatā€™s an option to look at too.

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I just use the Chrome copy link plugin to point the recipe title back to the original web address of a published recipe. If I want to create a formatted document I do so in Google Docs or Dropbox Paper and add a link to it from Dynalist.

Just came here to say I voted for this feature as well, to be able to link to a publicly available URI for any node, whether folder, document, or bullet. And, yes, I came to this from WorkFlowy, but please donā€™t hate me for it. 惄

I also came to this from a couple decades of work building websites. One of my first jobs was to create a CMS for a large organization. The philosophy behind what were building was to view every element of discrete information in the database as a resource node. We wanted to build something that would allow even paragraphs on a page to be reused across the organization. In the words of someone earlier, that sort of amounts to link to a paragraph in a Google doc.

As someone else mentioned earlier, in our taxonomies of ideas, topics, events, and so forth, sometimes discrete branches can be made public while wanted to keep the tree itself, and all its other branches and leaves private. Yes, we can promote a bullet node to document-level, but that messes with the structure of the hierarchy and taxonomy.

So, I sincerely hope this goes forward, even though it violates the philosophy behind how Dynalist is currently structured.

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This ā€˜sharing nodes is like sharing a paragraph in Google Driveā€™ argument is invalid. In Google Drive, there is a hierarchy of information, within those layers, I can securely share an item publicly, or with specific individuals, WITHOUT elevating that item to the top level hierarchy within Google Drive.

This is not equivalent to sharing a Google Drive paragraph. This is equivalent to making someone pull a document out of their organized hierarchy and moving it to the top level of a userā€™s drive.

It would be awesome if this was a feature open to those who needed it, so they could easily share lists with whoever they choose, at any level of their hierarchy of organization.

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I am a long time Workflowy user and I just decided to try Dynalist for the many additional features it offers, but I am almost ready to abandon it because it appears that to continue sharing nodes I will have to break my structure and move them all to the top level. Why!? Why canā€™t I just share a node? The other user can put the node where ever makes sense to them in their structure, and I can keep it where it makes sense in mine.

Completely frustrated and baffled by Dynalists refusal to allow sharing nodes.