I think this might have been covered before from a different perspective. This was WRT refactoring the Main.WebHome to move the user/company info and the TWiki "maintenence/intro" stuff off the main page.

I was entering a user's name, when it struck me that writing User.DavidLeBlanc was much clearer then writing Main.DavidLeBlanc in terms of describing the semantics of the link.

It also suggested the idea of things like User.DavidLeBlanc#email which would mean "substitute the value of sub-topic "email" from the user's page for this link". Possibly use @ as a lead character to mean this semantics and not just link semantics: @User.DavidLeBlanc#email --> me@fooPLEASENOSPAM.com in the rendered text, but User.DavidLeBlanc#email --> DavidLeBlanc (NB. I didn't do anything special to get the "#email" on this link - seems like an error to me since the actual topic name is Main.DavidLeBlanc, not Main.DavidLeBlanc#email. I would expect "#subtopic" to have the normal browser semantics of positioning to the anchor on the indicated page, but not to show as part of a link - maybe this is just me.)

In like vein, you could have @User.DavidLeBlanc#address, @User.DavidLeBlanc#phone - or any value anchored by a subtopic marker.

(I really need a Perl book - then watch out! )

-- DavidLeBlanc - 20 Mar 2001

I totally agree that they should be in a separate, site wide context, er, web. If for no other reason that you can't just invent People like you can invent concepts.

(Hmm. in fact, consider that the registration of users is just a wizard with approval to create concepts in a particular context and that actually you might want a generic mechanism for the creation of such wizards). I have no opinion on the extraction of variables from pages except to say that I hesitate in calling them SubTopics. TopicProperties perhaps.

I also think that 1) site-wide configuration should be in a special web and that 2) per-web configuration pages should have a special name, to avoid clashes with user defined concepts in that Web. (Consider that there is a middleware company called WebMethods).

If such topics do need to live in the user defined contexts, err webs, then perhaps they should have a topic prefix that could be considered to be owned by TWiki. Hence, TWikiHome, TWikiNotify, TWikiStatistics.

-- MartinCleaver - 20 Mar 2001

At my company we've just moved user defined preferences from the user's "home" TWiki page (in Main) to a HiddenAttachment off the same page. The format is the same as now, but the user edit via a form. Next we'll be arranging this so that there are two pages for a user. One in a Person WEB, which is the view given to the rest of the world. The other will be a personal portal, where for instance, users can have notifications of topic changes.

-- JohnTalintyre - 21 Mar 2001

Funny concidence. Yesterday I turned Main. MartinCleaver into a portal for myself. I added two embedded searches to return the topics that had my signature in them. Nice.

What I couldn't do was return a list of all new topics to which I had not yet contributed.

-- MartinCleaver - 21 Mar 2001

A similar (less active) topic has been going on in: UsersWeb, if you want to contribute there....

-- EdgarBrown - 21 Mar 2001

I've moved it to here...

-- MartinCleaver - 21 Mar 2001

Please, move all the users and groups to a separate web named Users ...

Then we could automagically link all user names to the corresponding topic

Benefit: we finally stop adding "Main." (or wathever it is in your installation) to every user or group reference.

-- AndreaSterbini - 06 Feb 2001

I was not very fond of this idea, but thinking about it, and combining it with a MultiLevelWikiWebs we could make users have their own directories for personal pages. That is, make the user name a directory inside the Users web, and put the main personal page(s) --with standard file names-- inside it.

That would reduce clutter in some instalations (I see the pontential for some of this happening in mine).

That way that they can refer to their own topics as Users.MyUserName.MyPersonalTopic

I'm still not too convinced about Adrea's MyUserName.MyPersonalTopic as a reference, however any un-resolved link, that exists in the users web could be expanded on topic save to have the Users.MyUserName normal link. That way we let the computer do the thinking.

Some brainstorming:

• We would have a standard file structure to find user files
• The only pages in the users web should be either user pages or user directories (maybe a few top-level files like UserRegistration or user list, but not much more).
• Once the structure is there, additional customizations like user skins, or templates could be allowed, and would be easy to find.

See also: PutUsersInUserWeb [21 Mar 2001]

-- EdgarBrown - 10 Feb 2001

I have just created a patch which allows one to put all user related info on a seperate web. See UserWeb. Perhapes we should merge these topics?

-- KevinAtkinson - 26 Jan 2002