Quicker access to last changes on a Wiki page

[Christian Boos]

I propose to add a new local navigation link for the wiki, called Last Change, which would go to the diff view for that wiki page, diffing between the last 2 revisions.

This would be a shortcut to Page History / View Differences.

Also, this would be consistent with the Browser's Last Change link (currently only avaible in the TracDiff branch).

A corollary to this change would be to removal of the Recent Changes link, which can currently be easily misinterpreted as providing the same functionality as the one suggested above for Last Change. Instead, the Recent Changes links to a kind of restricted Timeline, which is somehow redundant with the true Timeline.

[Christopher Lenz]

cboos, please see #107 about why the special RecentChanges page was introduced.

For quickly showing changes, I'd prefer a less obtrusive approach: highlight the changes in the HTML, directly on the page. So for example, if you've come from the timeline, you'd see the recent changes highlighted.

I could also imagine storing the last time a user viewed a page, and automatically highlighting the changes since that time.

[Christian Boos]

I see. The purpose of the RecentChanges is different than the Timeline. From #107:

It is not the same. The timeline shows all changes to any Wiki page, while a RecentChanges page shows every page once, but ordered by the time of the last change.

So, in essence, it's a kind of TitleIndex, but sorted by the time of the last change instead of being sorted alphabetically. I'd rather see that accessible as an alternative presentation, from the TitleIndex page. This would also enable the addition of other kind of indexes (thinking about a structured index, instead of a flat one, for example).

That being said, I also think that highlighting the changes directly in the HTML would be good, but IMO this is what the proposed Last Change link should do.

[Christian Boos]

Superseeded by #3250, which wants to introduce Last change and Next change links for the wiki diff view.

[Christian Boos]

The most common usage for Page History is for looking at the latest change. So I'd like to propose that in the Wiki View mode, we replace the Page History link with a Last Change link, that will go to the Wiki Diff mode for the latest version.

This plays well with r3416: since this revision, the Wiki Diff mode features the following navigation links:
← Previous Change | Page History | Next Change →
therefore it's very convenient from there to continue browsing through the sequence of changes or to jump to the Page History mode.

Please try out the attachment:wiki_last_change-r3423.patch​.

Related changes include the renaming of the Title Index and Recent Changes links to Index by Title and Index by Date, in order to prevent any confusion between Recent Changes and Last Change (see comment:4).

Note: A further improvement for the index links could be to have a single Wiki Index link. This could point to the Index by Title page by default, with a possibility to switch from there to the Index by Date mode (other index modes could be implemented, like pages grouped by Wiki words).

[Christian Boos]

Implement some navigation changes, as a follow-up to r3416 and #3250.

[Christian Boos]

Above patch applied in r3470.

The Page History should probably added back in the future, but not until there's a single Wiki Index link, as suggested in comment:6; in order to keep the number of page navigation low.