Persistent [[Timestamp]]

[chrisb .not at. ewetel .dot. net]

If a wiki page is used to document a progress/process it may occur that multiple timestamps are used during successive edits.

Doing so results in renewal of older timestamp.

This ticket may be seen in context with ticket #955

[cboos]

I think the current implementation should be renamed [[Now]]

and that we fix the [[Timestamp]] macro so that
it becomes indeed peristent.

Comments?

[mgood]

Well, changing the meaning of existing macros is probably a bad idea. I agree that [[Now]] would be a more clear, so maybe this should be an alias for [[Timestamp]]. However, I don't understand how you would make the [[Timestamp]] macro persistent, since WikiMacros are only processed when the page is rendered, you don't know when the particular timestamp was added to the page. This would probably require a macro that was processed on saving the page, which isn't currently supported. I think we should probably give this some discussion before proceeding.

These wouldn't be a real substitute for the requested timestamp changes, but some possibly useful related macros would be [[LastSaved]] and [[Created]]

[cboos]

(changing the status, as I've not actually started to work on that yet)

[cboos]

Instead of a macro, the functionality originally requested would perhaps be better achieved by the way of a new "Signature" button in the wiki toolbar of text edit fields, which will insert the current author name and the current time as plain text.

I think lots of other Wikis do it that way.

[cboos]

Indeed timestamps and signatures are closely related.
See ​MediaWiki:Help:Signatures for example, which has a nice syntax that we could adopt:

Function	Wiki markup	Resulting code	Resulting display
Signature plus timestamp	~~~~	— [[user:Username|Username]] [[timeline:2006-11-27T19:46:32+01:00|19:46:32, 27 November 2006 (UTC)]]	— Username 19:46:32, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
Signature alone	~~~	— [[user:Username|Username]]	— Username
Timestamp alone	~~~~~	— [[timeline:2006-11-27T19:46:32+01:00|19:46:32, 27 November 2006 (UTC)]]	— 19:46:32, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

In the above, Wiki markup would be what the user writes, Resulting code would be what would actually be saved. We would need a preprocessing stage here.

comment:4 still applies, the signature button could simply insert ~~~~.