Wiki Discussions - Factors that leads to this design
I plan to use wiki as a library to capture issues developers faces in the product which they are working on, and share creative solutions that they thought of to solve the problem. Each of these wiki library sits inside a site that focuses on the product which is hosted on a seperate SharePoint web application. The web application is not the only web application hosted in the SharePoint farm, hence I should provide this feature as an add-on.
Another factor which I considered are the type of discussion that may take place. Sometimes organisation introduces a new discussion list (which I'm also doing for each product community hosted in this portal) which focuses on getting questions answered. Out of the box discussion list just facilitate normal discussion to take place. I always believe in making features in SharePoint reusable as much as possible, to empower the information worker to collaborate the way they are most comfortable with.
So here are the list of things that I took into consideration.
1. I should not make any wiki changes at the farm level, as I do not know how other people are using the wiki library. So if they need discussion, it should be a feature that they could turn on.
2. I should allow the site owner to select the discussion list template to use, and bring as much of the features of that discussion list into the wiki discussion as possible.
Adding wiki feature @ library level
In this series, I've illustrate how to create new wiki templates (image are broken due to upgrading bug. still in the process of fixing that). But that can't work for this scenario, since I only want the customsation to be added @ library level. So just to recap the previous series, out of the box wiki creates pages based on ghosted (uncustomised) copies of "12/template/documenttemplates/wkpstd.aspx". Content of the wiki are actually stored in the columns in the wiki library. This shows that wiki page doesn't differs too much from a WCM page. Putting the wiki page into edit mode shows that it is just another web part page.
So to provide discussion below the wiki page @ page level, I can just add a web part into the bottom web part zone.
Next, preparing the storage