Feature Proposal: Highlight WikiNames with unique colors

Motivation

Quick differentiation between users (in our case, for project management with multiple people on a task).

Description and Documentation

Highlights WikiNames with a color specified in the WikiNamed user's preferences page, much like the WEBBGCOLOR setting. As it stands, the patch requires that a user set NAMEBACKGROUND to a color as given by StandardColors; otherwise, their WikiName is not highlighted.

I also added a section to PatternSkin's style.css to alter the link's appearance slightly:

.twikiNameLink {
  color: #222 !important;
  border: 1px dotted #666;
}

Attached patch works with Dakar (TWiki-4.0.1)

Examples

Impact and Available Solutions

Implementation

The implementation is pretty naive. For each WikiWord rendered, the UsersWeb is searched for probable WikiName topics (Store::getTopicNames); those found are then searched for settings (Prefs::getTopicPreferenceValue). Unless the Store module caches results, and it doesn't appear to, that might be a lot of processing on link-heavy pages.

That said, because our site has few users, this doesn't cause any notable slowdown for us.

-- Contributors: JasonPhelps

Discussion

-- JasonPhelps - 11 Feb 2006

Nice and colorful idea. Will make TWikis look even more like a playground. Could make some sense in ThreadedDiscussions.

-- FranzJosefSilli - 11 Feb 2006

See ChangeLinkColorForTopicOrWeb

The site www.abelard.org is a good illustration of how annoying that playground of colour can be. The site used to be a LOT worse, they've toned it down recently.

Look at serious professional sites that get a a lot of traffic. Simple, plain white or off-white background; good branding. A few web-safe colours used consistently. Altering the font colour for unvisited, visited and non-linked hyperlinks, use of underlining are all accepted and common. Tryng to invent soemthing new, expecially something garish like this, is a kiss-of-death. It makes it look childish and immature.

See also http://www.ficml.org/jemimap/style/color/wheel.html http://www.cloford.com/resources/colours/websafe1.htm http://colormixers.com/mixers/cmr and of course StandardColors

-- AntonAylward - 11 Feb 2006

I didn't want to repulse Jason too hard, but Anton is of course right.

-- FranzJosefSilli - 11 Feb 2006

As a plugin - sure why not. But this feature can only slow TWiki down and with very little gain. It does not really add a lot of value. It is more a gimmick. Normally you have hundreds of users on a TWiki and they cannot possibly have their own colours that are very different from each other. Looking up the colour in each users topic will take time and will for sure mean a slowdown. This belongs in a plugin.

-- KennethLavrsen - 11 Feb 2006

I agree fully with Kenneth's sentiments, although for our office (and potentially other small intranet-type distributions) it's really does give more value than it takes in processing time. The main problem with making this a plugin - from my very, very brief look at authoring plugins - is that the function I'm modifying within Render is not available for plugins, so this would require... what, a refactoring of Render.pm?

-- JasonPhelps - 13 Feb 2006

Request YetAnotherHandler. Now is a good time for that. I'm feeling Handlers come along.

-- FranzJosefSilli - 28 Feb 2006