Adapting org-mode to my needs

[David O'Toole <dto1138@gmail.com>]

Hi folks. 

I was a heavy planner.el user for about 2 years, then switched to
howm-mode for about a year, then switched back to Planner, and have
finally decided to seek a middle ground.

In my view, Org-mode combines about 98% of everything I liked from
both Planner-mode and Howm-mode. I'm already just about sold!

This email is about that other 2 percent :-) as I would like to adapt
Org-mode to my needs. 

One of the main things I have used Planner for is to publish a website
from my notes. I see that org makes nice html output from a given
page, but I have some questions about its configurability.

1. Is there a way to completely suppress the page header, or alter its
   contents (for example, not listing author and date at the top of
   all pages). Planner allows configurable html headers and
   footers. I'd rather just have the title at the top, and put these
   things at the bottom. I'd also like to put a set of common links
   across the top of the page, as a sort of menubar, like many sites
   have. 

2. I want to publish a set of interlinked, related pages as a
   "project." I think it would be easy enough for me to write an elisp
   function that runs through a list of *.org files I want to publish,
   publishes each one in turn, and then uploads each file to my site
   via Tramp. (This would approximate the way Planner publishes my
   stuff. It would help if org would let you specify the folder that
   html output is to go in, and if it allowed Tramp URLs.)

   However, would inter-page links work? In Planner, the link
   [[pagename]] takes me to the file "pagename.muse". Then when the
   pages are published to html, it becomes a link to "pagename.html"
   so that the pages link together correctly in both Emacs buffers and
   in the web browser. 

   What about links to other external files? I have the following
   directory structure in my Planner:

   /home/dto/Plans    (my planner files)
   /home/dto/e        (e-scripts, my *.el that i've written, and other
                      publishable attachments)

   I can make a link to [[../e/thisfile]] and as long as I replicate
   the same directory structure on the webserver, the links resolve
   correctly once the files are published to html.

   This would seem crucial to my publishing a whole website of related
   pages using org. How would I go about making this work in org?

3. Planner/muse allow image links. It will actually put the image in
   the buffer for you, so long as it can find the file. 

4. In howm-mode, one doesn't need to specify an explicit list of pages
   to be searched; instead you give it a folder and everything in that
   folder counts as a page. This makes it easy to make new pages/topics
   (whereas in org it seems like I would have to add them manually to
   the list.) This isn't a crisis, as I can always just write a script
   to update the list based on what's in the folder (and share the
   script so that other org users can take advantage.)
 
5. Is there a way to get TODO etc to publish as something besides <h4>?

Let me know if I can help add these features to Orgmode. I would be
happy to help contribute changes/solutions if a developer can point me
in the right direction.

I'm interested to hear your thoughts. Thank you. 

BTW, org is great!!!


-- 
Dave O'Toole
dto@gnu.org