I was thinking to how to make a CategoryEditor when a small idea struck me: We could use categories to properly set the ALLOWTOPICCHANGE property of a page and thus create a sort of Poor Man's WorkFlow.

• enhance the category handling code to:
  • use different templates for each category variable
  • use the rendering template as a pattern to retrieve previous values
  • use different values depending on the current category value
• change the template for rendering a category to "\tSet * ALLOWTOPICCHANGE = %CATVALUE%"

The outcome of this should be a page that

• can be changed only by the proper group of people.
• the values proposed when editing the page are just the ones deriving by the workflow definition

-- AndreaSterbini - 18 Jan 2001

This is beautiful. I was thinking along similar lines, but you have refined it better. I want to use TWiki as an interface to our bug tracking system, and then as the status of a bug changes different templates can be used to create the procedure to follow.

Similarly, I was thinking that TWiki has some beautiful infrastructure that can be extended to make it a full document management system, with controlled topics, approval/edit/review permissions, statuses, and email notification of changes.

-- SvenDowideit - 18 Jan 2001

This would be very useful - I'm looking at applying TWiki to a DB of RFI (request for information) questions and answers, and want to build in an approval feature whereby a limited group of people can move an entry from Draft to Approved. I'm not sure I fully understand how Andrea's idea would work, but certainly changing templates based on the value of a specific category field makes a lot of sense.

Has anyone done any more work on this?

-- RichardDonkin - 16 Jun 2001

I'm just starting to code categories using meta tags - GenericMetaDataStoreForTopics. I'll think about this as I'm doing it.

-- JohnTalintyre - 17 Jun 2001

This "small idea" really is pretty powerful. Two points:

• Unless I'm missing something (entirely possible) wouldn't it be cleaner to use "\tSet * ALLOWTOPICCHANGE = %CATVALUE%Group" ?

• This means someone could edit a page, change the category, save, and be unable to edit the page thereafter. It'd be nice to let them know they were about to go "beyond the point of no return".

-- PaulReiber - 19 Jun 2001

Please take a look at WorkFlowAddOn which allows you to do what you try above...

-- ThomasWeigert - 11 Mar 2005

And WorkflowPlugin , which looks less obsolete.

-- MartinCleaver - 02 Oct 2007