#                   Number of seconds a topic is locked during edit, default "3600" :
$editLockTime       = "1200";

Solution: Make this a variable similar to any of the other variables in TWikiPreferences.

Result: Admins and users will be able to change this variable from the TWikiPreferences pages. It will be one less thing that admins will need to edit files for. It will show casual admins who browse TWikiPreferences that this is not hard coded.

-- GrantBow - 19 May 2003

I am not sure having it non-fixed is a good thing. At least, as long as saving a page while somebody has bolen your lock is not issuing any warning or merge proposal...

-- ColasNahaboo - 19 May 2003

Good point about the warning re broken lock to the original editor... Anyway, I think this might be useful but should be customisable at site and web levels only - it's reasonable to have a customised lock interval for a group of people, but if you set a per-user lock it's not clear what it means (does it affect pages that I am editing, or pages for which I want to break the lock), and it could be confusing. Editing TWiki.cfg isn't too hard, but it seems that many people leave the default quite high - would be good to set it to 10 minutes perhaps, and more importantly to make TWiki default to 'release lock' when saving. Currently, most locks expire due to age rather than due to someone saving the page.

-- RichardDonkin - 19 May 2003

Actually, it might need to be hard-coded in TWiki.cfg due to this getting sourced by TWiki.pm and the various CGI scripts that depend on these variables. Moving this to a variable might be more difficult than I first thought. Of course it's still possible to allow some specific script to update this value via sed.

I agree with the thought about changing the release value down from one hour to something less. I chose 20 minutes to allow for thinking-time for editing, but not making folks wait a full hour. I also agree that if it was a variable then the semantics of overriding it with other variables is murky at best. Regarding the "Release Edit Lock" checkbox, there is already a variable for its default setting, so again this is just a standard default setting issue and not a coding issue.

-- GrantBow - 21 May 2003