Feature Proposal: Add current topic to "My Links"

I would like to see a link in the personal left bar: "Add current topic". Clicking would add the current topic to the bullet list and directly go back to (or even without leaving) the current page.

Motivation

Going to the personal left bar topic and manually adding the link to the topic, plus adding the right web to the topic link, removes the user from his flow. Adding a topic to the list should be thoughtless, so the focus stays on the topics.

Description and Documentation

• The personal left bar topic text is fetched
• The current page Web.Topic is appended to the list
• Preferable the user is presented an option to give the link a name, with the topic title as default
• The topic is saved
• The user is lead back to the topic he was viewing

Using AJAX:

• The user does not leave the current page

Examples

Impact and Available Solutions

Implementation

-- Contributors: ArthurClemens

Discussion

-- ArthurClemens - 29 Mar 2006

This is an awesome idea. This is a bit like bookmarking and the left bar could grow rapidly, so there should an "easy remove" option too.

Sidenote: Don't know how to implement this in AJAX, but an slow TWiki Server (like mine) could get in some trouble, if the AJAX server side processing takes as long as the normal TWiki processing.

-- TobiasRoeser - 29 Mar 2006

Tobias, it depends on the nature of the AJAX call. See the documentation of the rest script in TWikiScripts and the documentation of registerRESTHandler in Func.pm

-- RafaelAlvarez - 30 Mar 2006

Thanks for the link, it is always interesting what pages resides on Codev that I never perceived before.

About the speed. There are fast perl cgi applications around, but TWiki is not one of them. I never made myself coding steps with AJAX (untill now), but as HTTP is stateless, there are potential performace issues e.g. with access control. I can't believe that it will be much faster than usual dynamic Twiki pages, so I would prefer normal TWiki behavior. But on the other side, I saw speedy AJAX demos on the web and my TWiki Server will maybe in the near future replaced by a faster one.

Are there any AJAX-based plugins/demos for TWiki to test?

-- TobiasRoeser - 30 Mar 2006

yes, I'll be publishing some in the next weeks i think

however, you are right that AJAX is not a good answer to performance issues.

for eg, the TWiki.org server is highly loaded, thus AJAX requests will also take a long time to be processed, without the normal browser feedback. This will result in many cases of multipl submits, and lost transactions, due to users giving up, and moving on to other pages.

-- SvenDowideit - 31 Mar 2006

Ok, I've created a simple solution with help of the CommentPlugin. The only draw back is, that after adding the bookmark, you will not be redirected back to the original topic, but this can than be achieved by clicking on the newly created bookmark.

To use my solution, you have to create a new Template for the CommentPlugin. For that, simply create (or modify) the new topic TWiki06x01.UserCommentsTemplate and add the following lines (inside a verbatim tag):

 Add a quick bookmark to the current viewed topic. This is designed to be used inside the personal <nop>LeftBar. -- TWiki:Main.TobiasRoeser %TMPL:DEF{PROMPT:quickbookmark}% <input type="hidden" name="comment_url" value="%BASEWEB%.%BASETOPIC%" /> <input %DISABLED% type="submit" value="%button|Add%" /> quick bookmark %TMPL:END% %TMPL:DEF{OUTPUT:quickbookmark}% %POS:BEFORE% * %URLPARAM{"comment_url"}% %TMPL:END% 

In the personal LeftBar simply add: %COMMENT{type="quickbookmark"}%

-- TobiasRoeser - 05 May 2006

see JSPopupPlugin - it will allow you to put TML into what will be shown in a popup dialog. I personally like the COMMENT one

 %POPUP{anchor="<span class='twikiButton'>add comment</span>" popuptext="% COMMENT%" popuptexttype="tml"}% 

-- SvenDowideit - 07 May 2006

Sorry, but I did not really understand in which way this is related to the Quick-Link-In-Personal-Left-Bar issue. Is this a way, to move the edit/save/(re-)view cycle of the LeftBar into a separate window, to avoid leaving the current page? But the, the current page does not reflect any changes to the LeftBar. Hmm, quite confused.

Ups; I just found a bug in CommentPlugin. After Svens last post, when commenting this topic the comment will be inserted before his verbatim %COMMENT% code snippet. I inserted a space to avoid this behavior in the meantime.

-- TobiasRoeser - 07 May 2006

Tobias, you're right, its only just related. JSPopup in this context, only removes the COMMENT from being inline in the html. when you hit the 'Add Comment' button it works identically to the current impl. (and thus re-refreshes the view)

I am working towards being able just refresh the changed portion, but thats aolng way off.

-- SvenDowideit - 08 May 2006