Item12738: Preliminary port of EcoTrashPlugin

EcoTrashPlugin just made the other Wiki Ecologically correct. This item is the port to Foswiki.

There are some blocking issues in other components that I'll report in another task, so it's not ready to be released to Extensions.

But I thought I'd at least get it into svn.

-- TimotheLitt - 30 Jan 2014

Hi Tim, thanks for porting this plugin to Foswiki. Could you shed some light on the differences between EcoTrashPlugin and TrashPlugin? Thanks.

-- MichaelDaum - 30 Jan 2014

EcoTrashPlugin provides a full GUI with the ability to restore individual items as well as to delete them. It also provides the ability to inspect items. There's a maintenance function that can be configured to expire topics. There's an optional minimum retention policy. It will deal with most manually-created issues - pub/directories without topics, metadata for attachments that disappeared. The maintenance function is available from the manager as well as a cron job. It provides detailed logging of what it does, and you can see what it will do without committing. It should eliminate the need for shell access to deal with the trash.

It does everything suggested in the decade-old feature proposal[http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/EmptyTrash]] and endless support requests that everyone talked about/demanded but never worked on - and more. (Note that the screenshots there don't reflect the final code.)

See the topic in svn, or on twiki.org - or try it - for more details. It's pretty well documented.

On the downside, TWiki's Store interface doesn't have all the capabilities of Foswiki's. So EcoTrashPlugin assumes the traditional TWiki storage of topics and attachments and has to navigate the directory structure & do unlink/rmdir. It doesn't support alternate back ends. TrashPlugin does.

I don't plan to make a project of optimizing/customizing it for Foswiki. A full port should use Store for all the functions. If you like it, you're welcome to do so. If not, feel free to kill it. I just thought I'd provide feature parity.

With respect to the WebHome change that you reverted - the TWiki plan is to ship it as a core plugin, but keeping the documentation in the management GUI allows easier maintenance and avoids having updates replace a core topic. A conditional include in a rarely-accessed topic was a small price to pay. When packaged as an add-on, the modified WebHome is provided under another name - but that creates issues when the core changes the topic. Obviously, Foswiki can make different choices.

As a matter of courtesy, if you revert a change or have an implementation concern it should be noted on the respective task. Or even a private e-mail. I only noticed that there was one more checkin than I'd made - which isn't a reliable means of communication. There was no urgency for deciding what to do - the change didn't break anything and seemed minor enough to fall under the general 'port TWiki plugins' rules rather than requiring a feature proposal. So there was no need to start a reversion war.

-- TimotheLitt - 30 Jan 2014

Hi Timothe,

For notices on code changes, you might consider subscribing to DeveloperEventsMailingList. SVN commit messages all go to that list. If the task notifications are working correctly you also should have gotten an email that the task changed. In any event, I agree that a task note would have been an appropriate courtesy.

Regarding the changes to WebHome, if you put this customization into a ViewTemplate for the web instead of a modification to the topic itself, the feature can be enabled without requiring any topic changes. The issue is that we don't normally ship the WebHome topics in our upgrade packages, and other update tools like the foswiki-upgrade-check script also skip all WebHome topics. And as you note, we definitely don't want extensions shipping core files like WebHome. Foswiki has made a real effort to not regularly modify topics that the installation might customize.

Using a ViewTemplate for the web would also allow you to add things like a "Restore this topic" button to the individual topics themselves and not just place the functionality into the WebHome topic.

-- GeorgeClark - 31 Jan 2014

... ViewTemplataes are one of the most powerful - and underestimated - feature of Foswiki and TWiki.

-- MichaelDaum - 31 Jan 2014

No actions for a long time. See TrashPlugin for a different solution available by now.

-- MichaelDaum - 14 Jun 2016

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