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TrackChanges

Description

On an open wiki, that anyone can edit, or on one with multiple editors, verifying changes made by others requires time and a fair number of clicks. This page lists a number of tweaks to make this task easier.

Please add or link other tweaks useful for tracking changes.

Better RecentChanges pages

PmWiki's RecentChanges pages are a good way to check recent wiki activity, but the default format displays only a list of links to the pages. There are two inconvenient things:

• to see what are the actual changes, one must click first on the link to the page, then on the "History" link;
• it is difficult to know which changes were reviewed (unless one remembers the timestamps).

This snippet will enable a direct link to the page history. The link includes a timestamp and when it is clicked, its appearance changes to "visited link"; if a new edit of the page is made, the link in RecentChanges will display as "unvisited link".

Place this code by the end of (farm)config.php :

foreach($RecentChangesFmt as $k=>$v)
  $RecentChangesFmt[$k] = str_replace('$CurrentTime',
    '[[{$Group}.{$Name}?action=diff#diff$Now|$CurrentTime ]]', $v);

To benefit from the "visited link" feature, your skin/css should define different styles for visited and non-visited links. The default PmWiki skin does; if yours doesn't, you can add to a file /pub/css/local.css such a code for dark-violet visited links:

This recipe is now enabled on pmwiki.org, see RecentChanges.

See also:

• Delta bytes RecentChanges -- how many characters were added/deleted when a page was modified.
• Recent Uploads Log -- to also display uploads in the RecentChanges pages
• Custom RecentChanges -- various other tweaks of these special pages
• LocalTimes Display RecentChanges and History timestamps in the local timezone of each visitor.

Shorter RecentChanges

On a wiki with many pages, RecentChanges lists may grow to become very large. While it is possible to define a maximum number of lines (see $RCLinesMax), it is safer not to. Here is what else can be done.

Create a new wiki page Site.AllRecentChangesShort with the following markup:

Then, this page will display the first 50 lines of AllRecentChanges, that is 50 most recently modified pages. In some cases this is enough to track the activity for a week or month. This tweak is used here on PmWiki.org: see Site.AllRecentChangesShort. For a longer discussion, see RecentChanges Excerpt.

WatchLists

See Watch Lists. To use here "visited links" like in RecentChanges (see above), you can use such a pagelist template (add in your Site.LocalTemplates):

!! Better WatchList
[=
[[#RCstamps]]
[[{=$FullName}?action=diff&source=y&stamp={=$LastModifiedTime} | \
{(ftime "%d.%m %Hh%M" "@{=$LastModifiedTime}")} ]] | \
'''[[{=$FullName}|{=$Name}]]''' - [[~{=$LastModifiedBy}]] \
({=$LastModifiedSummary})\\
[[#RCstampsend]]
=]

And in your WatchList page, use (:pagelist ... fmt=#RCstamps:).

Optimizing page history

The SQLite recipe also strives to optimize page history handling.

A Notify tweak

You can use Notify to receive e-mails when wiki pages are edited. This tweak in (farm)config.php will place links directly to the page history, instead of to the page:

 $NotifyItemFmt = " * {\$FullName} . . . \$PostTime by {\$LastModifiedBy}
    {\$PageUrl}?action=diff";

See also:

• $NotifyItemFmt and $NotifyBodyFmt, where you could place a link to your AllRecentChangesShort page.
• PITS:01171 for a way to include the edit summary and the page summary in the notifications

Log Recipe

• ActionLog : "Maintain a page log of wiki actions"

See Also

• LocalTimes Display RecentChanges and History timestamps in the local timezone of each visitor.
• GrepRC Search the RecentChanges entries similarly to a pagelist
• SpamFilters Automatic blocking of some spambots

Contributors

• Petko

Comments