9/20    Is there a way in Twiki to have children inherit settings from a
        parent? I know there is a WebTopicEditTemplate which you can use
        for an entire Web, but what I want is to be able to have all of
        the children under a given topic automatically be populated with
        a template of settings when created. Is there a way to do that?
        Right now I copy and paste my settings each time and not only does
        that take time but there's a chance I forget to do it or else make
        an error.
        \_ Setting of arbitrary parent *topic*?  I don't know of any feature
           by default.  For my purpose, I wrote a plugin that made twiki
           use a custom EditTemplate depending on the suffix of a topic
           name.  I imagine similar concept can be used to check the the
           parent variable.  Search twiki site first to see if such plugins
           already exist.
           \_ Well, I just want the concept of a child topic inheriting a
              template from its parent topic.
              \_ But how do you specify *which* settings it inherit?  When
                 you first create a topic, twiki loads the default topic
                 template and loads it in the edit box.  Settings are
                 interpreted on the fly by running through the topic text
                 file twice.  The settings are just part of normal text
                 as far as it's considered.  You need a way to specify which
                 setting to inherit by perhaps wrapping it around a
                 TWikiVariable.  And given that you can change the parent
                 of a topic by changing its metadata, interpreting it on the
                 fly is probably the best way to handle it given current
                 twiki behavior.
                 \_ It should inherit all of them. Every Set = from the
                    parent gets set in the child at creation time. If the
                    parent changes later then too bad.
                    \_ Keep in mind that TWiki didn't even have a concept
                       of parent/child until few years ago.  At least for
                       the current implementation of new topic template
                       reading, it looked to me like you'd have to actually
                       overwrite that function within twiki's edit script
                       itself and can't be extended with just plugins.  That
                       is, grabbing the variable defines from parent and
                       putting it in place during creation.  What I was
                       suggesting where the settings are read on-the-fly
                       at each access *can* be done via plug-in.  Choosing
                       the right wiki is a difficult task, partly because
                       the ideals of each wiki devel teams are different.
                       Wikis were originally meant to be unrestricted, which
                       is an ideal that TWiki developers still try to hold
                       to.  That is one of the reason why there are commercial
                       wiki implementations popping up designed from groun-up
                       to have access restrictions.  My main reason for
                       choosing TWiki?  It's one of the few that supports
                       versioning of attachments, and rest of my group is
                       still very shy of php, which ruled out MediaWiki.
                       (And I believe MediaWiki has even less access control.)