How can I create Talk-Pages?

Hi,

I am new to foswiki and a friend of mine is installing the software, I will be the content manager and also do as much admin work as possible. My new wiki will be a database similar to wikipedia; I have searched almost all of the support pages, but did not find the following:

What can I do to have each Topic connected with some kind of Sub-Topic that can be used as a Talk page that many people might know from wikipedia?

I have thought about possibilities like creating a seperated Web named "Talk" where Topics with identical names may be stored, or creating topics with identical names + an anttached word like "Talk". But any of those possibilities must be added as a manual link on each page, and might be accidentally deleted from a page when edited, and it will not exisit when a new topic is created. The same problem will occur when I use the comment box.... What I need should be generated automatically, and accessible trought the footer bar, right next to the "edit" button.

My apologies if that does exist already and is just named differently. Thanks in advance for any answer.

-- LieVen - 21 Feb 2014

You can use topic templates to add a link to every new topic to a Talk page, or you can simply put the link into the page templates (.tmpl files) where it isn't vulnerable to deletion. The link on the footer bar is trivial to achieve, again through page templates. In your position I would generate a very thin skin on top of Pattern that overrides the relevant portions of the default templates to add the required links. It's not done as standard because it's easy to do when creating your local skin (cover).

-- CrawfordCurrie - 24 Feb 2014

Thank you very much for the answer. I'm glad to see that it is possible what I want to do. Now I only need to find out where to do these changes :- ) One question remains though: Will the "Topic" page and its "Talk" page remain attached when renamed automatically? Or this just (technically spoken) a different Topic page? Could you point me to where I can find information about that? There are lots of information on this wiki, but it's difficult to find several things. Thank you again.

-- LieVen - 24 Feb 2014

No, they are separate topics. There's no way to link them for a simultaneous move AFAIK, though there might be a plugin somewhere (maybe the TopicInteractionPlugin? I don't know).

-- CrawfordCurrie - 24 Feb 2014

MetaCommentPlugin that is. It stores comments as structured META data within a topic. So you can edit, approve and delete them individually, as well as render all of the discission differently e.g. as nested threads.

-- MichaelDaum - 24 Feb 2014

Thanks to both of you for your answers. I'm not yet sure what the best way is to find what I want, because actually the screenshot of the TopicInteractionPlugin page looks like what I want, because I do not wish to have the comments inside the Topic. (It might too quickly happen that the Comments contain more data than the Topic itself.) I'd like to hide the comments just as it is in wikipedia - which I guess y'all know.

-- LieVen - 24 Feb 2014

If I would choose the way of adding a link into the footer of each page, with a link creating a new page named "TopicTalk", how can I avoid that it appears on the next page? The problem is that one might re-create a new page which will then be called "TopicTalkTalk", then we get "TopicTalkTalkTalk", etc. ... I thought about making a new Web for those talk pages, where there is a link in the footer pointing to the original page, which in that case can bear the same name (e.g. Main.Topic vs. Talk. Topic). I think that might be the best way, if there is no better option. Is it possible to separate the page's contents from the comments when using the MetaCommentPlugin or the TopicInteractionPlugin ?

-- LieVen - 25 Feb 2014

I deleted the text because the software rejected any change because it thought it "may be spam"

To answer my own question, I found the answer here: TalkContrib "shows a Wikipedia like discuss-button". Thanks anyway for helping me.

-- LieVen - 25 Feb 2014

And I restored it again, because it's interesting

-- CrawfordCurrie - 26 Feb 2014

For anyone who has the same idea, here is my solution:
What I now did is the following, avoiding any plugin. It does not work with all kinds of wiki, but in the way I do it, it will work.
- I created a new web called "Talk"
- In the WebLeftBar of the Main Wiki, I have a link to the Talk-Web using the same name of the topic, e.g. Talk.%BASETOPIC%
- In the WebLeftBar of the Talk Web, I have a reverse link leading back to the page e.g. Main.%BASETOPIC%

Now you can switch back and forth between the article and the talk page.
(Note: as an addition, I have added some restrictions to the Talk Web to avoid users creating new topics in there; for instance, the WebLeftBar's links leading to "create", "changes" etc. are ALL pointing to the Main Web, not to the Talk Web.)

- LieVen - 14 Mar 2014

Note - I fixed the text that was triggering the spam filter for this topic.

-- GeorgeClark - 19 Mar 2014