Feature Proposal: Make User Modified Templates More Upgrade Resilient

Motivation

No content that is supposed to be user-modifiable should be in the TWiki (System) web, otherwise upgrading TWiki is a nightmare. Unfortunately, this is not the case for some of the user-modifiable pattern skin templates. In particular, the following are in the TWiki web:

• WebBottomBar
• WebTopBar

Description and Documentation

Move the two templates listed above and change the reference in the including templates.

Examples

Impact

Implementation

-- Contributors: ThomasWeigert - 2010-09-25

Discussion

Agreed. But to be more resilient, e should not ship pages in the Main web that users are customizing. For example, the Main.TWikiUsers topic is created by the system if it does not exist. Another example, the TWiki.TWikiDocGraphics has a link to create a Main.TWikiDocGraphics based on a specific template if it does not exist, or links to it if it does.

Here is an idea to solve the top/bottombar issue:

• Ship as is in TWiki web, add docs that if to customize them to clone in Main web
• Enhance VarINCLUDE with a fallback="TWiki.WebBottomBar" feature so that the include is first tried in the Main web with fallback to TWiki web. (A conditional IF could be used as well, but the fallback"" option is probably faster at runtime)

-- PeterThoeny - 2010-09-28

7 days passed since date of commitment. Assuming that we agree on spec, I set this proposal as AcceptedBy7DayFeedbackPeriod.

-- PeterThoeny - 2010-10-02