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Terminology
This document aims to clarify all kinds of terminology throughout the project.
This document is a work in progress, it may be modified during development.
Users are pretty straightforward. Everybody that signs up on the platform is a user.
A trip is literally what it sounds like: a trip, also knows as a journey.
Every trip has an 'owner,' which is the user that made the trip (maybe it's the organizer, or just that one person that takes care of all the planning and stuff). Every trip can have a name, this allows you and others to identify the trip very quickly (e.g. 'USA 2019'). Besides the name, there is also an option to add a synopsis of the trip, we're thinking in the line of: 'USA: CA, OR | Chilling and road-tripping | August 2019,' we're sure users will come up with some original input. The description is a longer text about the trip. The idea is most certainly not to write a report of your trip in the description, but you can add extra information here, as the name and synopsis are limited to 100 characters. In the description you could for example write up all the countries you've visited on a world journey, all the states you've been or a general description of what the idea behind the trip was or what you've done on this particular trip.
Multiple users can be connected to a trip because they are 'members' of the trip. That is, they participate in the trip. The trip may be a road-trip with a couple of close friends, or a large bus-trip organized by a travelling agency. Every trip has at least one member, but there can be more. Every member will have a role that decides what rights they have (editing, viewing stuff etc.). Besides members, which participated for the complete (or almost complete) trip, there are also visitors. Visitors only participate in a small part of your trip. It might be that you go have dinner with them while travelling, or that your trip is entangled in their trip and you have a couple of mutual days in your respective trips. This will be supported by the platform. The visitors can see the detail of the trip, reports and sections on the day that they are participating. You can always restrict content to 'visitors, members and me.' In this case, these parts are not public, but visitors will also be able to see that content (on the day they participate).
All trips that start must come to an ending, therefore, you can add the starting and ending dates to a trip to indicate when you are traveling/have been traveling (yes, these dates can of course be in the future, to allow for the planning we have in mind as extension of the platform). There is another interesting option you have with a trip (and as you'll see practically all parts of the platform): you can restrict its visibility to for example only the members, or to the members' friends etc. Lastly, you can add payments to a trip (this is also a planned extension). Things like car rentals and stuff are attached to a trip rather than a specific part of the trip (a section, see below). Therefore you can directly attach them to a trip. Payments are only visible to the members (and possibly visitors) of a trip, they cannot be published.
When enjoying a day on you lovely trip, you might want to report back to your home-base (read: friends and family at home). Make a report for this. Once again, making a report means you are the owner/writer of this report, and you are connected to it. Every report you make belongs to a trip, so when people look at the trip, your reports will be listed there. The report has a name again, which makes it distinguishable from the other reports (although you may add multiple reports with the same name, that's not really handy). The main identifier of a report within a trip, however, is the date.
Every report lists the activities of one day. When viewing a trip, users will see the reports listed by date, or, if you are on the trip at the day other users check in, the report for the current date will be highlighted. A report can have a description once again, to describe what you are doing today, or how the situation has changed from yesterday. Once again, we trust users will find a proper way to utilize the description. Also possible once again is restricting the access of the report. If the trip is publically visible, but you want this to be a private report, that is certainly possible.
The last interesting possibility will be to add a planning to the report. It might be the case that you have planned every day in advance. Why let that information go lost somewhere in the system? Just connect the planning to the report and everybody can check the resemblance between your prior planning and the actual report.
We now dive deeper into the system. It might look complicated at first, but the idea is to make it easy to work with and we've tried our best to design the system for minimal time usage. In other words, enjoy your trip, don't spend you afternoon on your phone, don't ruin your trip; Enjoy the environment and worry about reports later. After a fun activity, you can write a section. A section is meant to be a short explanation of a certain event. You can write a section for example when getting back into the car after the visit. Add the start- and endtimes to indicate the length of the event. The sections within a report will be shown chronologically based on those times.
A section you write is once again, linked to you account, as you are now the owner. A section is also linked to a report. A section has some content, which will be where the bulk of you adventure goes, the content of all the sections you write makes the story. Besides this, it is again possible to restrict the visibility of the section on its own.
To every section, one can link locations (which include at most one picture to keep that phone down once again, this forces you to select that one picture you really like, instead of uploading 1000 pictures only one person really wants to look at, if they would be honest). You will also be able to connect payments to a specific section and in your content and reference members and visitors of the trip.
Writing a section is almost always a work in progress. Things might change, or you might have ideas about a section that you will only have to write in a couple of days. For these things, you can write a draft. A draft can be attached to a report or not. In case it is not attached to the report, it will show up in your account as a general draft. At any point in time and for any trip you can transform a draft into a section and publish it.
To be continued