Lesson hub and accounts
The Lesson hub is where people share the lessons they've made. Anyone can browse it, open a lesson, print it, download it as a Word document or fork it into a lesson of their own, all without an account. You only need to sign in to publish lessons, keep private drafts in the cloud, comment, rate lessons and follow people.
Browsing the hub
Open Lesson hub from the menu. Lessons are listed newest first. Use Search lessons to find one by its title or its author's name, and the RSS button to subscribe to new lessons in a feed reader.
Click a lesson to open its page. The page is split into tabs:
- Lesson: the lesson itself, with an About panel showing who made it, how many sections it has, when it was published and its star rating.
- Practice: work through the lesson a step at a time. See Interactive mode.
- Discussion: comments and ratings (see below).
- Proposals: changes other people have offered to make to the lesson. See Pull requests.
- History: the lesson's saved versions.
The Lesson actions menu (the three dots at the top of the page) has Print PDF, Download Word and Fork. On a lesson you published it also has Edit and Delete.
Signing in
Choose Sign in, enter your email address and press Send magic link. You'll get an email with a one-time sign-in link and a code. Either open the link on the same device, or type the code into Code from the email and press Sign in. The code is the easier route if you've installed the app, because email links often open in a separate browser that doesn't share the app's sign-in. See Installing and offline use.
Some self-hosted instances sign people in with a username and password instead of email. There you'll see Username or email and Password fields, and Don't have an account? Create one to make an account without an email address.
The first time you sign in you'll be asked to choose a display name. That's the only name other people ever see; your email address is never shown. See Profiles.
Saving lessons to the cloud
In the editor, Save to cloud offers two choices:
- Publish to hub shares the lesson publicly.
- Save as draft backs the lesson up to the cloud but keeps it private. Only you can see it, in Your drafts on the hub.
Once a lesson is in the cloud, the same menu reads Update published lesson or Update draft, and the other choice switches it: you can publish a draft when it's ready, or pull a published lesson back to a draft. You can keep up to 8 private drafts at a time. Published lessons have no limit.
Editing and deleting your lessons
Your own lessons show Edit and Delete buttons on their hub cards and in the lesson's Lesson actions menu.
Edit opens the lesson in the editor. If this device already has a copy of it, that copy reopens; otherwise a new one is made, so nothing you were working on is replaced. The editor shows Editing a published lesson (or Editing a cloud draft) so you know saving will update the version in the cloud.
Delete removes the lesson for good, along with its comments, ratings and history. To make sure it's deliberate, you'll be asked to type the lesson's name before the Delete button works.
Comments
Comments live on a lesson's Discussion tab. Type in Add a comment and press Post comment, or press Reply under someone's comment to answer them. Replies are shown nested under the comment they answer.
Comments can have simple formatting: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, code, lists, quotes and links. Pictures, videos and other embedded media can't be added. A comment can be up to 2000 characters, counting only the words you write, not the formatting.
Comments that contain language that isn't allowed are blocked before they're saved. You'll see Comment blocked with the reason, and you can change the wording and try again.
You can Edit your own comments after posting. An edited comment shows an edited label next to its time, so readers know it changed. There's no way to delete your own comment, so edit it instead, or ask a moderator if it needs to go.
Any comment can be translated into your language with Translate. This happens on your device and needs no account. See Translation.
When someone replies to your comment, or replies to a comment on a lesson you published, you get a notification.
Ratings
Next to the comment box, Rate this lesson lets you give the lesson 1 to 5 stars when you post a comment. Each person has one rating per lesson: rating again changes your earlier rating rather than adding a second one. The lesson's average and number of ratings show in its About panel.
Forking a lesson
Fork (in the Lesson actions menu) starts a new lesson of your own from any lesson in the hub. The original isn't changed. Your fork keeps the original's full history, so later on you can bring in changes its author has made since you forked it, and you can offer your own changes back to the author from the Proposals tab. See Pull requests and Variations.
Trusted collaborators
A lesson's author can add people by email to the lesson's Trusted collaborators list, in the collaboration dialog (see Live collaboration). Trusted collaborators can save changes to the lesson's title and content, and can review and merge proposed changes. They can't publish or unpublish it, delete it, or change who else is on the list. The author gets a notification whenever a trusted collaborator saves the lesson.
If someone else saved the lesson since you last synced, your save stops with a message asking you to merge their changes and then save again. Nothing is overwritten, for the author or for a collaborator.
See it in action
The people in these videos are made up; the lessons are real ones from the hub.
For how the hub, sign-in and comments work under the hood, see Lesson hub and accounts for developers.