Feature Proposals » Default topics that handle admin topics

Motivation

When I install TWiki for clients, the first thing I do is clean up and organize the "web admin topics" vs everything else. I'd love for the default to handle this.

Description and Documentation

I re-do the _default web in several ways:

• a WebAdmin topic that lists all Web* topics in the current web
• A WebTools topic that contains the list that has previously been at the bottom of WebHome
• WebHome doesn't have a list of utilities in it
• WebLeftBar contains a link to WebTools
• All Web* topics are parented by WebAdmin

Examples

WebAdmin

%METASEARCH{
    type="parent"
    web="%WEB%"
    topic="%TOPIC%"
    format="   * [[$topic]]"
  }%

example _in situ_

WebTools

   * WebTopicList - all topics in alphabetical order
   * WebChanges - recent topic changes in this web
   * WebNotify - subscribe to an e-mail alert sent when topics change
   * WebRss, WebAtom - RSS and ATOM news feeds of topic changes %IF{"istopic '%STATISTICSTOPIC%'" then="
   * %STATISTICSTOPIC% - listing popular topics and top contributors"}%
   * WebPreferences - preferences of this web

example _in situ_

WebHome

example _in situ_

Impact

• Better organization
  • All "adminish" topics organized together, listed together, with shared parent topic
  • Web Tools on their own page; editing of WebHome no longer makes this list disappear!

• No more orphaned topics as shipped
  • [[http://cfcl.com/twiki/bin/view/Sample/WebTopicTree][example _in situ_]

• Obvious naming convention: Web* topics are administrative

No impact on existing installations or webs.

Implementation

-- Contributors: Vicki Brown - 2014-04-05

Discussion

Does that apply to TWiki-5.1 release? TWiki-6.0 has a dashboard in each WebHome topic. One box called "Web Utilities" has the web utilities links.

Good point on how to handle additional Web* topics. I like the idea of having them parented to one topic so that they can be identified easily -- user provided topic names may start with Web* too. I do not see the reason why to have two topics, isn't one sufficient? I recommend calling it WebUtilities. The "Web Utilities" box could contain one more link to the WebUtilities topic called "more web utilities".

-- Peter Thoeny - 2014-04-07