The Discussion Plugin adds a discussion section after your wiki page for user comments. This is useful to separate page content and the discussion thereof and also, if you don't want to give normal users the right to edit the page but still want user contributed notes. A second component of this plugin shows a list of all pages in a namespace with a discussion section (called discussion threads) ordered by most recent comments. This allows you to create a very simple discussion forum in your wiki. The third component finally displays gravatar images of e-mail addresses.

~~DISCUSSION:[status]|[title]~~

This is the main part of the plugin. By including the ~~DISCUSSION~~ instruction in your wiki page, a discussion section will be appended after the normal wiki page content. To turn it off again, use ~~DISCUSSION:off~~. If you want to show the existing discussion but don't want to allow new comments / replies, use ~~DISCUSSION:closed~~.

After each comment there may be up to four buttons (depending on your rights):

• Reply: To reply to a comment (vs. commenting on the wiki page content), click the Reply button. The comment entry form will then be placed accordingly.
• Edit: Registered users can edit their comments; admins and managers can edit all comments.
• Hide / Show: Admins and managers can deactive and reactivate comments easily by this button. Hidden comments aren't shown to normal users and are displayed dimmed to admins and managers.
• Delete: Admins and managers can remove comments. Attention: If there are replies to a comment, removing it will also remove all replies!

Of course, the whole DokuWiki Formatting Syntax can be used in comments as well. But there are problems with headers and footnotes as they may produce conflicting IDs and thus invalid XHTML. I'm looking for a way to either allow only a subset of the wiki syntax or automatically create unique IDs.

There is no toolbar. I don't consider this a major drawback, as raw text is usually enough for comments. Advanced users who know the wiki Formatting Syntax are still free to use it. A toolbar for inexperienced users would be nice, but it's currently not possible to reuse the DokuWiki toolbar or a subset thereof.

{{threads>[namespace] [refinements]&[flags]}}

This displays a list of all pages of the given namespace with a discussion section. The list is sorted by the most recent comment.

Try the Discussion Plugin plugin on the playground at Wikidesign.