Quite simply, the reaction to Capsule has far exceeded my hopes. I’m thrilled.

As Capsule is a product in a nascent category, my biggest concern was that people wouldn’t immediately see the benefits it could provide. That clearly has not been the case. Capsule appears to be a solution to a problem people (at least subconsciously) knew they had; and they appear ready to embrace it.

It’s also been wonderful to see a few feature requests, bug reports and pull requests on GitHub already. Capsule is aimed at a developer audience, and it’s wonderful to see the community already pitching in.

Capsule Permissions

WordPress has a capability in it’s permissions matrix called unfiltered_html. You need to have this capability in order for certain things (like <?php ... ?>) not to be stripped from your content on save. On our demo site, this capability is quite obviously not available to the demo user.

This shouldn’t be an issue in most real-life situations as Capsule is designed to be a single-user journal and it’s reasonable to expect that the single user account is an admin account (which does have the unfiltered_html capability).

Where this has appeared to be problematic is on WordPress multi-site installs. It’s been reported to me that only the site-admin role has this by default. I haven’t dug in to confirm this, but I’d guess that’s accurate. I think it’s likely that existing plugins solve this and Capsule probably shouldn’t do anything to muck around with WordPress capabilities and permissions, but I’m open to creative ideas. Here’s the GitHub issue if you’d like to chime in.

My Capsule Usage

I use Capsule as a Fluid app, allowing me to invoke it easily from Launchbar and keep it out of my mess of browser tabs.

I have Capsule installed locally rather than on a remote web server. I find myself working without internet from time to time (coffee shops, airplanes, etc.) and don’t want to be without access to my notes. I have a CRON job that backs up my Capsule database hourly to Dropbox.

A number of people immediately thought of Capsule as a code snippet library. It may well be suitable for this, but that’s not how I use it. I do put code in it, but more of my entries are notes on implementation and architecture approaches (especially rejected approaches).

I primarily work on a laptop with an external monitor. I keep Capsule on my laptop screen while I have my code and browser on my big monitor.¹ Thinking, planning and notes happen on the secondary screen while main dev happens on the big screen.

Thinking and coding are two different acts. For best results, you want to be doing one at a time. Having things on separate screens helps me shift between these modes.

This post is part of the project: Capsule. View the project timeline for more context on this post.