Question

Hello, I'm not quite sure if this question is right here, but I found no better place ... I'm trying to find a wiki for our institute. I already did some research in the internet but there is one issue, which is not so detailed described as I need it, to make a decision which wiki to choose (and I don't really like the idea of installing and trying it with 3 or 4 wikis). We will need two areas, one which will contain basic information, that is also used by students, and one which contains also actual research topics. As you surely guessed one thing we need is, that students can't read in the research internals. I know that this can be managed, but I would like researchers to use the basic topics as well and not having these topics twice. So they are not two parallel areas but one is a subset of the other - and here some questions pop up:

- If a researcher is naming a BasicTopic in an article of the research area, will he create a parallel Topic in the research area, also the Topic already exists in the basic area (if he is not using any special link, because he would not know if it exists (or not think about it))?

- I guess it should be no problem to set different (for example) background colours to the template for basic and research. Can the user rights for this pages be also part of the templates or how would one define for a new Topic if it is part of the basic or research area and therefore by whom it can be read?

- can all this be solved by categories?

It would be nice if you could give me a short explanation how this could be solved in your wiki-engine (please as I'm not a programmer be economical with technical

Thank you very much in advance, Best regards Oliver

Environment

-- TWikiGuest - 12 Jun 2006

Answer

If you answer a question - or have a question you asked answered by someone - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status is in a drop-down list below the edit box.

Moved question from TWiki.WebHome topic to here.

-- PeterThoeny - 12 Jun 2006

I know KennethLavrsen does something like this with an iso 9000 twiki application. The "basic" information is the locked, approved iso 9000 topic, and the discussion goes on in the parallel "research" topics.

Once in a while discussion is refactored in, and the new set of topics are the approved (basic) version.

There are a number of ways to solve this in TWiki (including a number of ways to implement user group rights for this application), so once you get started on implementing this you will probably find the problem is not "finding a way", but finding "the best way".

Happy TWiki'ing!

-- SteffenPoulsen - 12 Jun 2006

Some ideas where the feedback topic is located in the same web and has a Feedback suffix to the topic name:

• Create a form to create new research topics (as seen in TWikiTemplates, MeetingMinutes, ChangeRequest, etc)
• Create a TWikiTemplates topic with this link: %TOPIC%Feedback
• When a user is in a FooBarResearch topic, %TOPIC%Feedback gets rendered as FooBarResearchFeedback
• Clicking on the question mark creates the feedback topic
• You can assin different access rights to research topics and feedback topcis
• You could also include the feedback topic into the research topic with a %INCLUDE{ "%TOPIC%Feedback" }%
• You could add a CommentPlugin feedback box
• You can create the feedback topic at the same time when the research topic is created, see TopicCreatePlugin
• The feedback topic could be located in a different web, such as a Feedback web; the link to the feeback topic becomes Feedback.%TOPIC%

If you want to run some meaningful reports on the research items consider using TWikiForms to add structure to the content.

-- PeterThoeny - 12 Jun 2006

We have several webs setup. One of them is palinly called "Public". This web is for our internal customers, so is world readbable (well, within our company anyway. The remaining webs we have is one per team. Each team has their own documentation. Private stuff is kept there, and access is controlled on a per web basis. If a team wants to surface anything to the public/customers it gets put in the public web, simply ...

-- AndersHolm - 23 Mar 2007