Feedback and discussion on the IncludeIndexPlugin

See also: TocPlugin, SectionalEditPlugin, TWikiForBookAuthoring, NamedIncludeSections, FineGrainedAddressing

Discussion

Compare to SectionalEditPlugin

The SectionalEditPlugin addresses the same problem with a completely different approach: it keeps one (possibly huge) wiki page for your printed document. The wiki way is emulated by opening small sections for editing.

Advantages of IncludeIndexPlugin:

• You can reference the sub-topics as plain wiki pages
• People can edit the sub-topics independently
• WebChanges etc. work as expected.
• Revision history of sub-documents is easy to track
• Need to render full document only when saving the master doc, but not for sub-topics

Advantages of SectionalEditPlugin:

• More topics mean more names, mean more possiblities to screw up namespace
• Sometimes, it is more convenient to edit many topics in one go
• TWiki (shame!) doesn't support Wiki:WayBackMode (yet), It is very hard to get a previous version of a composite doc other than storing printouts

Compare to TocPlugin

Advantages of TocPlugin:

• TOC specifically designed for print purposes

Disadvantages:

• Extra syntax for print headers & xrefs
• Not usable online?

Feature Requests

Better implementation of format="..."

Currently, expansion of $variables is just delegated to %SEARCH except for $topic, which is evaluated directly.

Bonus

syntax of FormattedSearch fully available

Malus

dog-slow

Bugs & Problems

Probably...

-- PeterKlausner - 11 Jun 2003

More Discussions

I changed some internal links to Interwiki links. This is to avoid broken links once the Plugin is installed.

-- PeterThoeny - 14 Jun 2003

I installed this on the Dakar releaser. When I try to preview a page that uses the

%INCLUDEINDEX{"Vicki.WebHome" format="   0 $topic"}%

syntax, I get an error:

Undefined subroutine &TWiki::extractNameValuePair called

-- VickiBrown - 14 Sep 2006

This is an indication that this plugin does not work on TWiki 4. Replace TWiki::extractNameValuePair with TWiki::Func::extractNameValuePair.

To the Plugin maintainer: Please consider upgrading this Plugin so that it runs on Cairo and Dakar codebase. HandlingCairoDakarPluginDifferences has more.

-- PeterThoeny - 15 Sep 2006

I too am using Dakar. I made the change described above (4 places in IncludeIndexPlugin.pm). I now get the error: Can't locate object method "readTopicRaw" via package "TWiki".

-- KenJessen - 26 Jan 2007