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Projects & sync

A project is a folder. Everything Plaza knows about it travels inside it.

Creating a project doesn't create a place your files move to — it points Plaza at the folder they're already in. Adopt an existing folder or create one in place; either way the folder stays yours, arranged your way.

What Plaza actually writes

One hidden folder at the project root — .plaza/ — plus one visible YourProject.plaza marker file you can double-click to open the project. Inside .plaza/:

• entities/ — one small JSON file per tagged item. Tag one file, one sidecar appears; the other ten thousand files have none. This sharding is why cloud sync never trips over itself: two people editing two files touch two different sidecars.
• attributes.json — your attribute and tag schema, plus the naming pattern.
• board.json, planhome.json — the moodboard and the Planning dashboard's authored bits.
• planning/todos.md — your tasks, as a readable markdown checklist (Planning).
• documents/ — the Planning notes pool.
• assets/ — images pasted or dropped onto the board.
• people.json and per-device journals — who's in the project, and the activity feed (People & sharing).

Everything derived or personal — the file index, thumbnails, your open tabs, your favorites — is kept per-machine in the app's own cache, deliberately outside the synced folder. Two people sharing a project never write the same per-user file, which is what keeps sync clients from forking "conflicted copies".

Syncing between machines and people

Put the project folder in Dropbox, Google Drive, Syncthing — whatever you already use. Metadata written on one machine appears on the other, and a teammate's changes show up live in your open window. All writes are atomic (a temp file swapped into place), items are sharded as above, and when a sync engine does produce a conflicted copy, Plaza folds it back in automatically and keeps the losing version archived in .plaza/conflicts/ rather than losing it.

Prefer to keep your notes to yourself on a shared folder? A project can be created with private metadata: .plaza/ lives in your app data instead of the project folder, so nothing of yours syncs to the team.

Everyday project operations

• Switch projects from the picker at the top of the sidebar; each project remembers its own tabs, columns, filters and mode.
• Archive a finished project to move it out of the dashboard's main row — nothing on disk changes.
• Remove from list forgets the project in Plaza only. Your folder, including .plaza/, is untouched.
• Relink — if a project folder moved or its drive isn't mounted, the dashboard marks it offline and lets you point at the new location. Identity lives in .plaza/project.json, so relinking is loss-free.

Uninstalling Plaza leaves every folder exactly as it was. Deleting a project's .plaza/ folder (and the .plaza marker file) removes every trace of Plaza from it — that reversibility is the deal.