# How to Navigate The HackMD

## General Hierarchy of Design Documents

The hierarchy of design documents are separated into 2 main sections: Maintainer-Approved workflows and Non-Maintainer approved workflows. In general, maintainer-approved workflows are expected to be upheld in the PR process, while non-maintainer ones are mainly ideas that could potentially be elevated into a maintainer workflow.

Each idea, maintainer-approved or not, are modularized through the use of appended notes.

An example hierarchy might look like this:

* Design Document 1
* Maintainer Workflows
* Appended Note 1
* Appended Note 2
* Non-Maintainer Workflows
* Appended Note 3
* Appended Note 4
* Design Document 2
* Maintainer Workflows
* Appended Note 1 (notice overlap)
* Appended Note 5
* Non-Maintainer Workflows
* Appended Note 6
* Appended Note 7

The idea is that design documents are your 1-stop shop for anything pertaining to the topic, generated entirely based on the embedding of appended notes.

## What are appended notes?
Appended notes are just that, they are notes that can be appended to various design workspaces.

This is to not only allow for a singular note to be visible across various design documents (say a reagent-based note may find itself in both the medical design document and the combat design document), but also to give modularity to permissions on a per-note basis (maybe you don't want someone to edit your idea!)

In general, you should **rarely** be adding content directly to a design document, but rather generating an appended note and embedding it into all relevant design documents. **Please be mindful of following the template of appended documents even if you add directly to the design document, so we can easily see who authored the idea and give credit where it is due.**

## So, what exactly should I be searching?
The beauty of this system is that all a user needs to do (if properly configured) is to search by the "design" tag and click the relevant design document(s), and every related item should be present.

## I want to create a new note!
If you want to create a new note, generate a note based of the "appended" template. Once you are satisfied with your note, proceed to embed it to the appropriate design documents. That's it, it's really that simple!

If your note does not have a corresponding design document to fit into (and it should be in at least one), generate a design document note for the more generalized topic (the department or abstract concept) using the design document template. You can also ping Cobby to generate one for you.