SID-00244: How To Make A Collaborative Blackboard

Status:	Answered	TWiki version:	4.1.2	Perl version:	5.8
Category:	CategoryRendering	Server OS:	RH	Last update:	16 years ago

One of our research groups has sections of people placed all around the world. They meet regularly to share ideas. They have a TWiki blackboard (or whiteboard) that each section can contribute to. One issue they had was layout and conflict when writing onto the whiteboard.

Here is how it is implemented. It may be useful for others. If you have any ideas on how to improve on it then please posts here.

The main whiteboard is the parent , here are the contents:

<table border="1" width="100%">
<tr>
<td bgcolor="lightblue" width="50%"> %INCLUDE{"WhiteBoard1"}% %BR%
[[WhiteBoard1][%ICON{home}%]] [[WhiteBoard1][%ICON{viewtopic}%]] 
[[%SCRIPTURLPATH{"edit"}%/%WEB%/WhiteBoard1?t=%SERVERTIME{$day$hour$min$sec}%][%P%]]  </td>
<td bgcolor="pink" width="50%">%INCLUDE{"WhiteBoard2"}% %BR%
[[WhiteBoard2][%ICON{home}%]] [[WhiteBoard2][%ICON{viewtopic}%]] 
[[%SCRIPTURLPATH{"edit"}%/%WEB%/WhiteBoard2?t=%SERVERTIME{$day$hour$min$sec}%][%P%]]  </td>
<tr>
<td bgcolor="lightgreen" width="50%"> %INCLUDE{"WhiteBoard3"}% %BR%
[[WhiteBoard3][%ICON{home}%]] [[WhiteBoard3][%ICON{viewtopic}%]] 
[[%SCRIPTURLPATH{"edit"}%/%WEB%/WhiteBoard3?t=%SERVERTIME{$day$hour$min$sec}%][%P%]]  </td>
<td bgcolor="yellow" width="50%"> %INCLUDE{"WhiteBoard4"}% %BR%
[[WhiteBoard4][%ICON{home}%]] [[WhiteBoard4][%ICON{viewtopic}%]] 
[[%SCRIPTURLPATH{"edit"}%/%WEB%/WhiteBoard4?t=%SERVERTIME{$day$hour$min$sec}%][%P%]]  </td>
</table>

Each child whiteboard (like WhiteBoard1) contains the following

stuff that goes on the board...

%REVINFO{"$topic last updated on: $time $date by $wikiusername"}%

-- PeterJones - 03 Apr 2009

Discussion and Answer

Not quite sure which category to put this in.

-- PeterJones - 03 Apr 2009

Thank Pete for sharing with the TWiki community! How about creating a BlackboardAddOn package, starting in AddOnPackageHowTo. You could also create the app in the Sandbox web under the Sample Applications section for others to try out.

I made some minor fixes to above HTML to make it XHTML compliant.

-- PeterThoeny - 03 Apr 2009

I have added an example in the Sandbox. See WhiteBoardShare

-- PeterJones - 2009-04-08

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