Six tool stations laid out on the bench. Every station declares one verdict and the implements that earn shelf space. The schema is the load-bearing decision; everything else fastens to it.
Citations
300
Read time
55 min
Cost
$30.66
Stations
6
UNITEXPEDITION
FORMATMD · YAML
STACKOBSIDIAN 1.10+
SCHEMABASES-FIRST
AI BACKBONEOLLAMA · LOCAL
PUBLISHQUARTZ + WHITELIST
The 2026 inflection: Bases became core. Dataview is unmaintained. Every workflow re-routes through typed YAML.
Bases shipped as a core plugin in Obsidian 1.9 (May 2025) and stabilised in 1.10 (Oct 2025) with card / list / Maps views. Bases reads only YAML frontmatter — it silently ignores the inline key:: value Dataview idiom [3]. So design typed Properties first (mandatory type: discriminator [15], flat keys since Properties has no nested objects [5], plural reserved keys mandatory in 1.9 [1]) — then route every workflow into it.
VERDICT. QuickAdd + Templater + daily-note inbox is still the dominant 2026 in-Obsidian combo. Web: official Web Clipper has retired Omnivore / MarkDownload. Backfill: AI Tagger Universe over Ollama (nomic-embed-text + Llama 3.1 8B) for zero-cost vault-wide retro-fill.
VERDICT. PARA-shaped skeleton with Zettelkasten-style atomic notes inside Areas. Typed Properties at the centre of every queryable note. MOCs and backlinks over deep folders. Pure Zettelkasten alone misfits technical material — split by content type (snippets, tools, runbooks).
VERDICT. Treat tracking as a 3-layer pipeline, not a single app. Books: Hardcover (free GraphQL) + Readwise → Book Search. Film/TV: Simkl as the hub (unlimited free vs Trakt's new 100-item cap), CrossWatch bridges Plex/Jellyfin. Don't store the catalogue inside Obsidian — mirror it.
VERDICT. Pick the opt-in (whitelist) frontmatter pattern over draft-style opt-out — one missing draft: true shouldn't be the only thing between a note and the open web. Default: Quartz + ExplicitPublish on GitHub Pages. Material/docs aesthetic: Enveloppe → MkDocs Material.
VERDICT. Two-plugin baseline: Smart Connections (sidebar discovery) + exactly one chat plugin (Copilot, Smart Composer, or Khoj). Don't double-index — three separate embedding indexes over the same notes is the recurring pitfall. Local backbone: Ollama + nomic-embed-text.
Vault-wide retro-fill against a hand-curated taxonomy [17].
05
Smart Connections + one chat
Sidebar discovery + exactly one chat plugin (no double-indexing) [10].
06
Quartz with ExplicitPublish
Wire the publish layer only after the schema is stable [8].
§03FAILURE MODES · KNOWN HAZARDS
Periodic Notes is dead. Unmaintained since 2022. Migrate to Journals before automating anything calendar-shaped — the children disagree here, and Journals is the correct 2026 pick.
Selective-publish leak. Even with publish: true, Quartz emits all non-markdown attachments — images, voice recordings, PDFs. Keep the raw vault private; mirror flagged content into the SSG repo via GitHub Actions.
Don't double-index. Smart Connections + Copilot Vault QA + Smart Composer RAG run three separate embedding indexes over the same notes [10]. Pick one chat plugin; let Smart Connections own the sidebar.
⊠ Open · gaps the 2026 ecosystem hasn't filled
Calendar → daily-note retro-fill. Google Calendar / iCal as a passive source for "shows attended last weekend" is not covered by any 2026 plugin in the survey — the closest match is iOS Shortcuts or a custom MCP integration via mcp-obsidian's patch_content tool.