With respect to refactoring, I did a lot of thinking about that too, and keep coming back to: "why"? TWiki is an organism grown by it's participants and takes on the structure, or lack thereof, based on how people contribute to it. Having said that, I think that there is some need for refactoring in the form of combining pages or creating index/toc pages for pages that have the same topical content (I know of at least 2 tigerskin pages...). Also, I see that there's a new topic for modularization of TWiki - another topic that's been addressed in the past.

I think some part of refactoring, or rather how TWiki gets laid out in the future, is a matter of educating people about how to add pages to TWiki - i.e. when that's a good thing and where the best places to add pages are. As an example, on the codev home page, we have "Developer News" and then links on 2 or 3 releases just below it. They're topical, and are good to keep around for the future, but do they really need to be on the main page for all time? It seems to me that putting them as links under Developer News in the "top is most recent" format would keep them in the public eye as the recent first format is meant to do and yet keep them under a sub-topic that makes sense. My point here is not to ask a single person or group to refactor TWiki, but rather to encourage us all to be editors to some extent and instead of adding and adding to a page, create a new topic and link the relevent pages to create a new master topic.

-- DavidLeBlanc - 28 Dec 2001

Howto create a link to the pre-refactored page

However, that sentence should include a link that makes it easy for someone to see the pre-refactored page. Fortunately, this is easily accomplished with a link constructed like so:

<a target=_blank href="%SCRIPTURL%/view/%WEB%/%TOPIC%?rev=1.1">here</a>

This will open a new browser window with the pre-refactored page, so the comparison can be readily seen. Of course my example uses version 1.1. You would use the version that existed prior to your refactoring.

Here's an example in action:

• View the first version of this page here. (opens a new window)

-- MartyBacke - 29 Mar 2002