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Wiki Edit Workflow Proposal

As wiki SPAM gets worse, as people start using trac for more critical projects, and as I develop the plugin that implements my evil master plan for world domination, there's going to need to be a lightweight, trac-ish way of allowing plugins to do page edit workflow. I have that need right now. I want to tackle this, I plan to post the result on trac-hacks.org, but before I spend a lot of time going down a development path, I think I should get some advice as to which path I should take; it's looking more and more like trac itself will need to be patched, and I'd prefer to do this in a way that the patch will likely be accepted into mainstream.

There appear to be (at least) two parts to this problem: (1) The default viewable version of a wiki page needs to be selectable via an extension point, not hardcoded as "highest version number", and (2) the version of the page which a user edits when they hit "Edit This Page" needs to be configurable, rather than "most recent".

I'm starting to think that (1) is going to require a change to the WikiPage class, and (2) a change to WikiModule.

In WikiPage, if version number is None then the default action is determined by the ORDER BY sorting in a SELECT statement. I see three choices here:

• patch WikiPage to add an IWikiPageVersionSelector extension point

(called before SELECT); this helps anyone implementing workflow

• patch WikiModule to add an IWikiPageProvider extension point; then

WikiPage implements IWikiPageProvider; this helps anyone using alternate wiki page storage and/or workflow

• don't patch the code; just have my own plugin do the job via

overriding and subclassing WikiModule, reassigning the 'WikiPage' symbol at runtime, and/or other guerilla tactics; this helps nobody other than myself

In WikiModule, right now an edit is hardcoded as "latest version" in process_request. But you'd actually want the "Edit This Page" button to edit the version you're looking at, or maybe the currently elected version, not the latest version. This probably needs a trac.ini configuration item to control it -- either another patch or another override.

Does anyone have any preference as to which of these routes I take? Feel free to edit this page...