Template Pages - Question

Hello all,

I am in the process of setting up Twiki/Foswiki as a knowledge base at my workplace and want to use the templates to create a consistent look across the wiki, for example for topics that can be classed as "general information" have a template with the main headings already set out so that people have something to work with rather than starting from scratch every time. I have a couple of questions:

1) For every topic based on a template I want there to be a corresponding discussion page. I have set up a template called GeneralArticleTemplate which contains the following line:

Click here to discuss this article.

So a link to a child topic with a name related to the parent topic (based on the template) is created and can be used as the Discussion page. However what I also want to do is for the Discussion page to have the %COMMENT% variable automatically inserted. I have not been able to figure out how to do this. Can anyone help here? I am not sure if it's even possible to insert a variable into a child topic when the parent topic is created via a template.

2) Whenever I try to create a new topic using a template and I select "Allow non WikiWord for the new topic name" it still tries to force a WikiWord type syntax. For instance trying to call a topic "This is not a Wiki Word" results in a topic called "ThisisnotaWikiWord". The reason I am trying to avoid WikiWords is that they appear to be very unpopular with the people I work with who seem to prefer the idea of free links. However it seems I can't use a template to create a topic that has a non WikiWord name. Does anyone know how I can do this?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Regards

Richard Smith

With 1), you could use my TopicCreatePlugin to create the child topic at the same time as you create its parent. I do something very similar on our wiki, where we the parent would be a project page and when its created we have a child page which contains the minutes, rendered using the CommentPlugin.

Read the documentation of the TopicCreatePlugin and let us know if you get stuck. My Foswiki enhancements for that extension has also been back-ported to TWiki by one of their remaining developers, so you should be able to use it on TWiki until you upgrade