[Feature]: Personal knowledge-base essentials: daily notes, i18n, covers and lightweight database views

[Ricky-zhang1]

What problem are you trying to solve?

OpenKnowledge already works well as an AI-native Markdown editor, but it is still hard to adopt as the primary interface for an existing personal knowledge base / Obsidian vault.

For daily use, I need a predictable 'create or open today’s note' action. Creating a file manually requires choosing the folder, generating a date filename and selecting a template each time.

I also cannot preserve the visual and organizational layer many long-term Markdown vaults rely on:

• The desktop UI is English only; Chinese-speaking users cannot localize it.
• Existing banner/cover frontmatter and CSS-based daily dashboards do not become a Notion-style cover.
• There is no native, frontmatter-driven table/database view to browse notes as a collection or embed a filtered view in another document.
• Charts can be built manually in HTML, but not as simple visual summaries of a collection.

These gaps make OpenKnowledge excellent for agent-assisted documents, but not yet practical as the main personal knowledge-base app for many Obsidian/Notion-style users.

Proposed solution

Could this be approached in small, independently shippable steps rather than as a full Notion clone?

1. Localization foundation (highest priority)

   • Add i18n infrastructure and a language selector.
   • Ship a zh-CN locale or enable community translations.
   • Avoid hard-coded UI text so additional locales remain possible.

2. Native daily notes

   • Add a command-palette action and optional shortcut: 'Create or open today’s note'.
   • Make the folder, filename pattern (for example 'YYYY-MM-DD'), template and idempotent behavior configurable.
   • Support {{date}}, weekday and week-number variables in template content.

3. Markdown-native cover image

   • Recognize a stable cover/banner frontmatter field, plus optional vertical focal position, and render it as a page-top image.
   • Keep it local-first: accept a project asset path or URL, and preserve unrecognized frontmatter unchanged.

4. Lightweight collection/database views

   • Start with a view over documents selected by folder, tag and frontmatter, not a separate proprietary database.
   • Render a sortable, filterable and groupable table with chosen frontmatter columns; allow embedding a saved view in another document.
   • Add basic counts and bar/line/pie charts only after collection views are reliable.
   • Relations, formulas, rollups and full Notion compatibility can wait.

The important constraint is that each feature remain local-first and persist in portable Markdown/frontmatter (with a small view configuration file if needed), rather than locking notes into a cloud database.

Area

None

Alternatives considered

For now I can keep Obsidian as the primary UI and use OpenKnowledge only for AI-assisted writing. I could also build daily-note generation with a macOS Shortcut and use HTML for dashboards/charts.

Those workarounds split the same vault across tools and do not solve UI language, native covers or reusable document views. A smaller built-in implementation would be much more useful than a large all-at-once Notion clone.

[nick-inkeep]

Thanks Ricky, we're actively working on or assessing best design for virtually all of these.

Question for you, can you expand on "Charts can be built manually in HTML, but not as simple visual summaries of a collection.".

And would love to hear what in particular you like about OpenKnolwedge for the AI agent authoring, so we can continue to double down on that.