Listing our topics, or our top-level topics

This is a "best practices" question I think; what's the best way to do this?

We're a small company, around 50 people. We want to use FosWiki for technical documentation, project planning, and user documentation (with the users having the ability to modify their documentation; everything open).We're relatively informal and very open internally.

I'd like the page you get to with the "simple" URL to the Foswiki virtual host to include a list of our topics; possibly listing only top-level topics. I'm hoping not to have to maintain that by hand!

I'm wondering if I should be setting things up in just one web, or if two (users vs. developers) or three (tech doc, user doc, project planning) would be better. I'm assuming there's no blatant "right" answer. But experience should help make better decisions here, right? So I'm looking to the people with more experience than me at using Foswiki (and twiki).

Is there any way to control which Web is displayed at the default URL? I'd like that to be the one the users are primarily interested in.

HomePagePlugin is probably the best solution for this atm. -- WillNorris - 30 Dec 2009

I'm interested in getting our content out of the Main web since there's so much fixed stuff in there that it causes confusion. And then I don't want the Main web to be the one shown by default. And I wouldn't mind giving it a different name, since most people will think "main" is where they're supposed to go! Also, can I control the order of the list of webs in the left sidebar?

I know how to put a complete topic list for a given web in the default main page. Is there a way to put a list of top-level topics for a given web only? Since you assign a parent topic when you create a topic, that creates a hierarchy, and there should be tools to exploit that hierarchy, right?

Or am I going at this totally bass-ackwards?

Keeping the Main web for user topics and SitePreferences is good practice.

I believe most people set up the "default"/Home web of choice just by using an Apache redirect or rewrite rules.

As for getting the top-level topics only, there are a number of ways to do this:

Using QuerySearch %SEARCH{"parent.name='WebHome'" type="query"}%
- For boring reasons, above search won't actually pick up topics that have no parent. This should be more robust (untested):
  - %SEARCH{"parent.name='WebHome' OR parent.name=''" type="query"}%
Using TreePlugin %TREE{"Support.WebHome" stoplevel="1"}%
- NB: This is the most reliable method.
Using DBCachePlugin %DBQUERY{"parent='WebHome'"}%
Using DBCachePlugin %DBRECURSE{"Support.WebHome" depth="1"}%

Working with hierarchical topics actually has a fair bit of room for improvement... I have an AJAX topic parentage browser half-working at http://trin.org.au, which I hope to turn into a generic contrib at some point (needs a re-write with client-side caching, and drag & drop re-parenting). Then there's SvenDowideit's SlickSitemapContrib, which actually does do drag & drop reparenting (if you disable strikeone validation