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Cells and links
Two primitives hold up the whole system. This page explains them properly, because understanding them is most of understanding Cellara.
A cell
A cell has an identity, a name, a body and a type. The identity is permanent — renaming a cell or changing its type does not make it a different cell, so links to it never break.
The type determines how it renders and what actions apply. A todo can be completed; an event has a time; a person has an avatar; a library shelves things. Underneath, all of them are stored and synced identically, which is why anything you can do to one kind of cell you can generally do to another.
A link
A link is also a cell. It has its own identity and its own type, and it joins two cells in a specific direction: one leads, one follows. Every link type has a reverse reading, so the same link is an "example" from one side and "example of" from the other.
This is why backlinks are free. There is no separate index of who points at you that could drift out of date — there is one link, and both cells can see it.
Link types carry meaning
Using the right link type is worth the two seconds it costs. Some of the common ones:
parts— this cell is composed of those cells. The backbone of projects and libraries.examples— a concrete instance of something more general.related— an honest "these belong together" when nothing more specific fits.references— source material.questionsandanswers— an open thread and its resolution.problems,benefits,gotchas— the argument around a decision.next— sequence, for steps and slides.
A month later, "show me the gotchas anyone recorded about this approach" is a question the graph can answer, purely because people picked link types instead of dumping everything into one bucket.
Structure is links, not folders
There is no folder tree. A project is a cell whose parts are the work; a
library is a cell that shelves other cells, and a shelf can hold other shelves. Because
these are ordinary links, a cell can sit in more than one place without being copied —
it is one cell, seen from several directions.
Display is never a copy
Every view in Cellara is computed from the graph at the moment you look at it. Nothing you see is a second, stale copy of your data that has to be kept in step. This is why renaming a cell updates it everywhere immediately, and why there is no "rebuild index" step anywhere in the product.