More Meta Data fields are needed.

There are several topics requesting additional meta data:

• AddCheckInComment
• AllowDesignationOfSummary
• SkipMinorChanges

This topic is for discussing issues affecting all these topics and adding meta data in general without talking about specific uses.

How hard it would be to add an extra parameter to the top META tag in topics? I'm wondering if there is much code that assumes the current parameters and would break if another was added or if it just stores them as a hash.

-- SamHasler - 28 Sep 2004

Technically it is very easy to add aditional meta data to the topic. Plugins can already now add proprietary meta data and it gets stored and remains with the topic transparently (although the API to do that is not there yet)

The question is if this is the right approach. Different kind of topic data could be cached: Topic summary, topic changes summary, minor changes flag, topic creator, topic creation date, etc.

This would serve as a cache to get at the information quckly. Another approach is to use some generic caching, encapsulated in the TWiki store. That is probably even better performance wise. Question is how the cache can be made optional; if there is a generic solution for cache without the need of compiling C code (discussed elsewhere)

-- PeterThoeny - 29 Sep 2004