TWiki Threaded Discussion

Making threads possible was primary goal why I enhanced CommentPlugin adding templates, namely toctalk template. See in action on my Twiki site.

Idea is, COMMENT adds also header with username and 1-line summary, and TOC creates structure. Further enhancement would be to allow creating forks in discussion, adding more (named and with increased header level) instances of COMMENT.

Please note: example uses my old way to format comment output. It might, or might not, be possible with current CommentPlugin - I have no idea, I did not upgraded or merged yet.

-- PeterMasiar - 19 May 2004

Peter, I think a threaded discussion mode is very important and direly missing from Twiki. So I was very excited when I read your note above. But to tell you the truth, I did not quite understand why you are considered this a threaded discussion, until I missed something. If I wanted to comment on the second item, rather than adding a comment at the bottom, how would this work?

Also, I may be misunderstanding, but when I think of threaded mode, I think of comments on a given topic being indented, comments on the comment being indented even more, etc., so that it is easy to understand what is being discussed.

-- ThomasWeigert - 20 May 2004

This would be a useful feature to have in TWiki. Sounds like a combination of BulletDiscussion with popup CommentPlugin comment boxes; a candidate for a new Plugin. See related links below.

-- PeterThoeny - 20 May 2004

Thomas: to start new thread, you need to edit page and add new instance of COMMENT. Then, people afer you can just comment in thread.

PTh: Bullets, headers, what you want - you have templates to create output as you want. I thought it is clever to use TOC to create overview - but with templates, you can have it differently, using same plugin code. Than was exactly the reason to implement them.

-- PeterMasiar - 20 May 2004

PeterMasiar, are you suggesting that there are comment boxes all over, one for each thread? Don't you think this would inhibit the readability of the page?

Maybe it would be better to have a small link "comment on thread" which gets us to an edit page that then inserts the text as a subitem (properly indented)?

Hmmm. I can see a TWikiApplication, where there are two links at the end of a paragraph

1. Comment on this item
2. New comment in thread

Clicking on either would open a text area. Upon save, the former would create an indented item below the current paragraph. The latter would create a new paragraph at the same indentation level. Question: Is there a way of knowing the current indentation level other than parsing the whole text? P.S. I found out that this suggestion is almost identical to one made by PeterThoeny in BulletDiscussion. -- TW

-- ThomasWeigert - 20 May 2004

1. Many newbies prefer COMMENT because they are afraid of full edit. Forcing them to edit will not do good. They are lost in editing raw page - not easy to find where you want to comment. It looks differently.
2. If big discussion started in a thread, it maybe deserves own page - refactoring is good to wiki.
3. another way to edit only part of the page is SectionalEditPlugin

-- PeterMasiar - 24 May 2004

I am in line with Thomas. Here is a simulated example using JavaScript. Nothing is saved, just a quick and dirty UI demo:

• It is foo bar
  • But I see it differently
    • You forgot about the cat

For the real implementation you would use a better icon and a small popup window instead of a JavaScript prompt.

-- PeterThoeny - 25 May 2004

This is nice idea and would love somebody implement it. But we had a minimal requirement: degrade gracefully if javaScript is disabled. Will it still work? Or are we changing rules? Fine with me.

-- PeterMasiar - 26 May 2004

Although authors may chose different Required Environment for their Plugin, I recommend to stay close to the standard so that the Plugin can be deployed in many different environments.

The example I made was just a Q&D example. The real implementation could use JavaScript and degrade gracefully. It can be done like the More formatting help link in edit mode:

<a target="TextFormattingRules" onClick="return launchWindow('TWiki','TextFormattingRules')" href="%SCRIPTURL%/view%SCRIPTSUFFIX%/%TWIKIWEB%/TextFormattingRules">More formatting help</a>

If JavaScript is enabled you get a small popup window, else it falls back to a new window of undetermined size.

-- PeterThoeny - 30 May 2004

Would PurpleNumbers make the implementation of this feature easier? Or, if we were to implement a threaded text mode, would we in effect also have to implement PurpleNumbers?

-- ThomasWeigert - 31 May 2004

FYI... I have the above discussed feature implemented now, albeit not using Javascript but by conventional TWiki style editing, using the ideas from MultiEditPlugin. I based this plugin on RenderListPlugin, but had to make some modifications to that plugin to make it truly reusable.

-- ThomasWeigert - 05 Mar 2005