First-Principles Primitives
These are the primitives. Everything in Design reduces to combinations and constraints on these concepts.
Wikilink
Section titled “Wikilink”[[Page Name]] syntax that resolves to a link based on page title, not file path. Optional alias: [[Page Name|display text]]. Invented by wiki systems, canonicalized by Obsidian.
Standard markdown links ([text](path/to/file.md)) break whenever a file moves. Wikilinks survive reorganization because they reference identity, not location. For a growing knowledge base this is the difference between a living wiki and a graveyard of broken links.
Wikilinks must round-trip cleanly. A Web CMS edit that produces [[X]] must be identical to an Obsidian edit that produces [[X]]. If the translation layer ever flattens to [X](x.md) the principle of round-trip fidelity is broken.
Backlink
Section titled “Backlink”An automatically-generated “pages that link to this one” list, computed from the full set of outgoing wikilinks in the vault.
Backlinks turn a linear document into an emergent knowledge graph. Readers discover related content without navigation; authors see ripples of their edits. This is the feature that makes wiki-style reading distinct from reading a docs site.
Backlinks must be computed at build time (scanning the full vault) and rendered in a standard position on every page — bottom of content, or in a right-sidebar panel. The starlight-site-graph plugin gets us partway; the rest is a translation-layer responsibility.
Translation Layer
Section titled “Translation Layer”The pipeline that converts Obsidian-flavored markdown into web-safe HTML (or MDX) while preserving enough semantic fidelity that a round-trip edit doesn’t corrupt the source.
This is the single hardest and most load-bearing concept in the project. Get this right and the three contribution paths compose cleanly; get it wrong and the entire “round-trip editability” principle is an aspiration instead of a property. See Design · Translation Layer for the deep treatment.
A tiered feature list: Tier 1 (full support, must round-trip), Tier 2 (partial support, best-effort), Tier 3 (not supported, documented workaround). Each Tier 1 feature gets a fixture page + expected output + round-trip correctness snapshot.
Open Authoring
Section titled “Open Authoring”A CMS pattern (popularized by Decap/Netlify CMS) where an unauthenticated or lightly-authenticated user can propose changes via a forked-PR workflow, without needing direct commit access to the source repo.
Removes the biggest contribution barrier. Without Open Authoring, “contributors shouldn’t need git” is impossible — you’d either need direct write access (which is a security problem) or contributors would have to fork manually (which is exactly the friction we’re trying to eliminate).
Primary contribution path for the Web CMS entry point. Decap handles the fork-and-PR dance; an OAuth proxy (Cloudflare Pages Function) handles the GitHub auth handshake.
Round-Trip Editability
Section titled “Round-Trip Editability”The property that a contributor can edit the same page in Obsidian, in the Web CMS, or on GitHub, and the other surfaces see the change without corruption. A → B → A === A.
Without this, contributors get locked into whichever surface they started with, and the whole “three independent paths” vision collapses. It’s also the only way the maintainer can keep using Obsidian as their primary authoring tool without dreading web contributions.
Constrains every translation-layer decision. No lossy transforms. No “CMS-specific” schema that’s different from the vault schema. Every Tier 1 feature gets a round-trip test fixture.
Content-Addressable / Stable URLs
Section titled “Content-Addressable / Stable URLs”The property that a page’s URL doesn’t change when the vault is reorganized.
Breakage of external links (from blog posts, from other wikis, from Google’s index) is a cardinal sin of any long-lived knowledge site. The whole point of publishing is that links stick.
Open question for now — frontmatter slug? permanent hash? simple title-slug with redirects on rename? See Open Questions.
Single Source of Truth (SSOT)
Section titled “Single Source of Truth (SSOT)”The principle that exactly one authoritative place exists for any given piece of content. Every other representation is derived.
Prevents drift between representations, makes conflict resolution tractable (one side always wins), and keeps the mental model of the system simple.
cybersader/cyberbase is the SSOT. The web wiki is derived at build time. The Obsidian vault (as local files on the maintainer’s machine) is a read-view of the repo’s current main branch. The Web CMS produces edits against the repo; it doesn’t hold any state.
In Obsidian parlance, a folder of markdown files + a .obsidian/ config directory that behaves as a self-contained knowledge base.
The vault is the unit of content cyberbaser operates on. It’s the durable artifact; cyberbaser is the delivery mechanism.
The cyberbase vault lives in its own GitHub repo (cybersader/cyberbase). Cyberbaser reads from it (possibly as a git submodule, possibly as a build-time clone) and publishes it. The vault must remain a fully functional Obsidian vault independent of cyberbaser.