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

[Christian Boos]

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

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

Comments?

[Matthew Good]

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]]

[Christian Boos]

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

[Christian Boos]

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.

[Christian Boos]

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 ~~~~.

[john.de.rooij@…]

I have created the TracMediaWikiSignature plugin, which implements the possibility to include MediaWiki signatures ~~~, ~~~~ and ~~~~~ on a Wiki page. It is based on the suggestions from comment:5.

During the saving of the Wiki page, the ~-code will be replaced with the corresponding signature of the editing user and the timestamp.

The username and timestamp will be shown in the standard Trac formatting. The timestamp will for example be a pretty formatted time difference (like: "5 minutes ago"), and it is linked to the corresponding date and time in the timeline.

The timestamps are stored in the content of the Wiki page, so successive editing of the Wiki page will not modify previous timestamps.

For the details of the TracMediaWikiSignature plugin, please see: ​https://github.com/joro75/TracMediaWikiSignature

In my opinion, we can close this ticket now, since the plugin is available.