Feature Proposal: Create a Skin without Editing Links

Motivation

In a TWiki application, it is often desired to not show any editing controls, either before the user is logged in or always. Either because the topic is a read-only topic, or because topic editing is done with more specialized controls, such as EditRowPlugin or SignaturePlugin or the various approaches to sectional editing. Having the ability to edit the topic as a whole may be undesirable for the general user, as various elements of the topic that should never be changed might have to be exposed then.

Description and Documentation

There are several subskins here:

• A skin that does not offer the various edit links.
• A skin that does not offer the various edit links unless the user is allowed to edit the topic.
• Others?

(An interesting side topic is whether there should also be a mode to hide all more specialized controls. In general, these would be visible.)

This is almost doable but there are some small gotchas that I ran into. There are a few topics that are leveraged in building up a page, such as the WebLogin related topics, which are not designed with this skin in mind and interfere. These topics would have to be slightly adjusted.

If there is resonance for this feature, I will go further and identify all these (small) changes.

Examples

Impact

Implementation

-- Contributors: ThomasWeigert - 2010-09-11

Discussion

I fully support this proposal. Spec needs to be fleshed out. I recommend to add a preferences setting that all skin authors are invited to use. Possible spec (up to debate) :

• Set EDITCONTROLS = on --- this is the default, e.g. edit, attach and links/forms in more screen that modify content are enabled
• Set EDITCONTROLS = authorized --- authorized users only, e.g. only users who are able to edit page see edit controls
• Set EDITCONTROLS = off --- turn off edit controls

If you intend to implement this I recommend to set the appropriate committer form fields in the change proposal form.

-- PeterThoeny - 2010-09-14