I'd like to suggest something that could be called WikiTemplates.

What I would like to see is the ability to create a "template" topic that is a list of WikiPageProperties something like this:

 IsTemplate: Yes
 TextField: Name=BookName, Width=50
 TextField: Name=Abstract, Width=50, Rows=5
 DropDownField: Name=Publisher, Values=@@["Que","Wrox","APress","O'Reily"]@@
 TextField: Name=YearPublished, Width=4
 DropDownField: Name=Author, @@namespace.Topics.Select({e | e.HasProperty("AuthorName")})@@
 TextField: Name=ISBN, Width=15

Then any topic that had the property Template: when edited would load a page full of data entry fields, one for each WikiPageProperty.

Templates could possibly be triggered directly with a URL like so:

 http://www.flexwiki.com/wikiedit.aspx?topic=<Topic>&template=<TemplateTopic>

If the template was changed and someone edited a page with content that did not fit into the changed template, it could give them a big editing field at the bottom for free-form entry. Such a capability would allow Wiki administrators to capture much more structured data without loosing the ultimate flexibility and empowerment of a wiki.

The Template: could even have WikiTalk to format any Template driven pages. This would of course beg the need to add features to WikiTalk to allow for processing of the page properties in a variety of ways. See http://www.dotNetInfluencers.org to see how I've started trying to do this albeit manually managing the templates as opposed to using such a feature as I suggest here.

-- Mike Schinkel [2004-07-21]

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