Question

I am a complete noob, trying to understand how this thing works. If anyone can help me along I would really appreciate it I guess I'm trying to understand how to use forms. How to create, edit, display data from, search and so on Been reading about them, but have not found any good examples to work with.

I am trying to create a simple message of the day function. I want the latest message of the day displayed in plain text, nothing fancy. I want to be able to edit the current message of the day, and make a new message of the day. Past motd's should be searchable, so each motd needs two values, the text and the date. I am thinking about trying the blog-plugin, which should be able to do this, but I would really like to know how to do it myself. Is this at all possible? If anyone could write a step-by-step I'd be very happy.

Environment

-- TWikiGuest - 07 Nov 2006

Answer

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Have you seen the "TWiki tip of the day" example in the TWiki web of the distribution? The TWiki.WebHome topic includes TWiki.TWikiTipsOfTheDayInclude.

The TWiki tips are created with TipsContrib. See the plugin topic for more info.

-- ArthurClemens - 27 Nov 2006

Here is a short list of what you need to do to create your own message of the day application:

• Create a template topic that has the default text for new messages, name it for example MessageTemplate.
• Create a MessageApplication topic and add an HTML form to create a new message topic based on the template topic. See example at ChangeRequest.
• In the form you can create auto-numbered topics, such as MessageID1001, MessageID1002, MessageID1003, etc. This can be done with a SEARCH on existing topics and some SpreadSheetPlugin formulae, or with a MessageIDXXXXXXXXXX topic name for the new topic in the form (TWiki expands 10 or more X'es to a sequential number). In any case, make sure that they sort properly, which is the case if you start with a high number.
• In the topic where you want to show the latest message, do a SEARCH, sorted by name in reverse order, limited to one topic. Specify a format="$text" if you want to show the whole topic text. See details in VarSEARCH and FormattedSearch.

-- PeterThoeny - 27 Nov 2006