Question

I'm new to Wikis (especially TWiki) and have a question about the Wiki page content handling. We are planning to use TWiki in our company as a basis for a knowledge-based system: we have several software products, and for each product we would like to have different kinds of information available about different aspects (eg. user cases, software development issues, test cases etc.), and we would also like to separate information regarding to specific versions of our products.

Eg. a typical wiki page would look like this:

Topic

User comments

version 1.0

version 1.1

...

Technical information

version 1.0

version 1.1

...

etc.

So far so good. But.

The question is: is there a way to extract information from the TWiki pages by filtering through specific versions and/or specific subtopics? Eg. I would like to see the Functional Specification of all the topics for version 1.0. Or I would like to see what test cases do we have for product version 1.x. Is it possible? I checked all the plugins and addons but did not find any which could do this. The result of these "searches" should be produced as a new TWiki page, or as an HTML page, or anything.

I would imagine this functionality as a special query engine that can not only link whole pages (eg. columns in a matrix) but also subtopics in a page (rows), extracting from each page only the relevant information. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Another would-be-nice functionality would be to have a special grouping ability. Sometimes I would like to see the page like above, but sometimes I would like to see the features of the x.y version grouped together. That is:

version 1.0

Use cases

Technical comments

...

Is it possible with TWiki?

I am not sure that I wouldn't be better off with a special database tool, but I definitely would not like to lose the nice abilities Wikis have (freely and easily editable by anyone, etc.). However if anyone has any idea I would be glad to read it.

Environment

-- TWikiGuest - 10 Feb 2005

Answer

One approach would be to have a master page divided into sections, and then each section would be it's own topic and included in the master. See http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/TWikiDocumentation?raw=on for an example. Then the search could be something like *OneDotZero, *TwoDotThree. I don't know if this is the best method, but it should work.

Something like TWikiForBookAuthoring might work for you too. Experimental deployment at: http://twikiplugins.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/twiki/view/HowToThinkLikeAComputerScientistUsingPython/WebHome

-- MattWilkie - 10 Feb 2005

You can define a TWiki Form to keep track of product details. With a FormattedSearch query you can list product specific details. You can go fancy and define a filter. See for example the TWikiInstallation directory.

If you want to track product specific details that are different from product line to product line, you can define one master twiki form that has fields shared by all product lines, and define a new form for each product line that has the fields of the master form plus product line specific fields. Like this you can define FormattedSearch queries over all products and queries specific to a product line.

-- PeterThoeny - 11 Feb 2005