RE: Editing existing entries?

Francisco Solsona wrote:

> "Anton van Straaten" <[email protected]> writes:
>
> > If you want to make lots of changes to text someone else has written, I
> > think adding a comment makes sense, so it can be discussed, unless the
> > change seems totally uncontroversial (a judgement call).
> >
> > OTOH, if you have major additions, i.e. new material as opposed
> > to changes, I think a separate topic is often a good idea.  For
> > example, looking at what you've done on the StringRecipe page,
> > you could create a StringBasics topic.
> > After that, you can add it to a higher level page, like StringRecipes.
>
> Uh oh, I think I just did the opposite. :-(  Not on purpose, of
> course, but I've just added a new recipe on the use of basic CGIs to
> the "Web Programming" topic.
>
> And, as a matter of fact, I was planning on adding some more: file
> upload for instance, which is not currently supported by the cgi.ss
> library, but it is a 10 liner extension, to the same topic.
>
> Should I not have done that?  (I'm pretty new to the Twiki world, try
> to use apples in the "you should do this, and that" reply).

We seem to have been settling on the idea of a single recipe per Twiki
topic.  Noel originally suggested this, and it makes sense to me.  It does
match the Twiki philosophy, and it doesn't stop us from creating bigger
combined pages if we want to.  (For an example of a big page, take a look at
TWiki.TWikiDocumentation, which is enormous, but actually consists of about
20 included topics.)

Having fairly granular topics means we can combine them in different ways if
we want to - either in their entirety, or indexed via the %TOC% feature.  It
also means that when editing, the scope of what you're working on is limited
so it's less easy to inadvertently change something unrelated.

What Gordon has done with the new topics that he added to the StringRecipes
page, is what I was getting at.  The AuthorGuide topic now describes this
approach somewhat, although it's a work in progress - as that page says,
feel free to poke holes.

I don't think "one recipe per topic" should be an unbreakable rule, though,
and I wrote something about that on the AuthorGuide page.  I could see
having a few closely related recipes on a single Twiki topic, especially if
the individual recipes are short.  For example, a short bit about file
upload would be fine on a topic about CGI, IMO.  If a topic grows too big,
it's easy enough to split it up.

The WebProgramming topic is one that I converted from the original cookbook,
and it doesn't currently use the topic-per-recipe approach - it follows the
structure used in the original WebIt! pages.  Part of the reason is that
most of those "chapters" were pretty short.  They should probably be
restructured before they get much bigger.  I'll take a look at that
tomorrow, but feel free to do whatever you need to in the meantime.

Anton



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