Question

Hi. I would like to be able to have a topic with text and tables, allowing the users to add rows to tables, fill data into the tables, delete rows, add comments etc, but not edit the page text. Is the only way to do this by adding the text with and INCLUDE?

Environment

-- TraceyMaule - 14 Jun 2006

Answer

If you answer a question - or someone answered one of your questions - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status selector is below the edit box.

The EditTablePlugin offers part of what you want. See also SectionalEditPlugin.

-- PeterThoeny - 14 Jun 2006

Hey thanks

-- TraceyMaule - 14 Jun 2006

Ok I have played with the SectionalEditPlugin, it really doesnt achieve what I was after. I would like to make a page uneditable while allowing the user to add comments via a comment box, or add rows into a EditTablePlugin. Can this be acheived?

-- TraceyMaule - 15 Jun 2006

here is an example of a form, but i dont want anyone to be able to edit the words... TraceyTestForm

-- TraceyMaule - 15 Jun 2006

How come you want to "police" so tight what people can edit in a form with a scope like this? Let go of the old "webmaster syndrome" and do not worry too much about what people edit.

In the old days when people used paper forms you would often see extra notes added when people needed to pass an important message and the form did not allow it.

I have been running a bug reporting / feature request / patch submission twiki application for years now with users that get no training and it has happened maybe twice that users have removed or altered the form itself. The only trouble they really have is that TWiki needs an empty line to make a new paragraph.

It seems your application is for software engineers that you can give a 10 minutes training in the new form. I would not worry too much about them editing the form text. If they do they most likely add some information that can turn out to be quite informing and important.

I continue to be positively surprised how TWiki can enhance communication between engineers because of its free format. It more than compensates those 1-2 occations where an engineer deletes some text by accident and a colleague has to restore it (edit-do-save in 2 minutes).

When all this is said and done. From a user friendliness perspective the EditTablePlugin enhances the ease of use dramatically but it lacks the feature of deleting and inserting rows in the middle. The EditTablerowPlugin could do that but it does not work in TWiki 4. I have been working on restoring it but it is major work for a perl novice like me because the old plugin was using quite many internal non API functions that have been completely removed in TWiki4 - and the original plugin author does not seem to have time to fix it.

-- KennethLavrsen - 15 Jun 2006

Hi thanks for your comments Bossman wants to lock down to this extent because there are areas in the web that will be open to all clients, who are not necessarily even computer lit. Yeah my boss is always demanding the most he can.. thats what CIOs are for isnt it?? Just a thought, if a topic was set to be editable, but text was inserted via %INCLUDE% from a non-editable topic, would that work?

-- TraceyMaule - 20 Jun 2006

Yes.

-- FranzJosefSilli - 20 Jun 2006