UseMod Wiki: WikiSuggestions/StartPackage

Ship a style guide with the UseModWiki downloadable tar file.

: What do you mean by "style guide"? I hope to add a small wiki database to the distribution soon, which would have a basic set of pages. I might also include an HTML pre-rendered version of these pages, which could also be used for documentation. Of course, I need to write the documentation before I can include it... --CliffordAdams

Set of "standard" pages

It would be nice if the download kit included a set of "standard" pages to help you get started. It seems reasonable, for instance, to want a local copy of the TextFormattingRules and many of the pages that it links to.

To make it generally useful, you'd have to eliminate links to pages that are outside of the base set. For instance, TextFormattingRules contains numerous references to UseModWiki, which might not be the home page for given installation of UseMod.

Of course, anyone could develop a set of such pages and make it available, but it would be nice to have a "base set" that got updated along with the software and reflected its latest capabilities.

BTW, I just got UseModWiki running, and I really like it so far. -- DanMuller

: Look at http://hytext.com/cgi-bin/wbt.pl?Intro_and_Tour [BrokenLink, 01. Aug 2003] for "Intro and Tour". I've been using these pages as a block set on a series of five wikis I've built in the past couple of weeks. I do it the brute force way -- open one browser window on the source site, one on the new site, hit Edit on the relevant pages, copy and paste the wikitext from one textarea to the other one. It takes about 10 minutes to set up a new wiki this way. -- JerryMuelver

: A better idea

: Here's a better way to do it. I have the entire framework for a UseMod wiki in free-link format pulled into a single text file. You open the text file in an editor, open the initial page of your new wiki, click on Edit, and copy -paste from the text file. Page names are set off with >>>>>>. Start at the top, and roll right through. Each page creates the links needed for the next page. It takes about 6 minutes to create a wiki this way. http://hytext.com/wikiframe.txt [BrokenLink, 01. Aug 2003] -- JerryMuelver

Thanks, Jerry, I used a lot of these pages.

A small problem I had: Links of the form BaseWiki?:action=blah wouldn't work for me, for instance the index links in the headers of some of your pages. I had to change these to an actual URL, and I skipped a couple of your pages because they used a lot of these links. Is this format a feature that I can enable in the wiki configuration file? I didn't see anything there that obviously related to it. -- DanMuller

Dan, those links are on a page showing link database functions, and most likely could be left out anyway. You could do a global search-replace to convert LocalWiki: to the full path to your ...cgi-bin/wiki.pl?... which would fix the linking problem. -- JerryMuelver

: A better better idea

One of the nice things that SWiki provides is that when you instantiate a new Swiki it's automagically populated with a set of starter pages that explain basic things like text formatting, a guest list, and so on. Of course, you can delete all of those pages. The way it's done is simply copying a set of files from the 'template' wiki into the new wiki.

While the exact same mechanism wouldn't work, it occurs to me that it should be pretty easy to provide a .zip file containing a sample database directory for a starter wiki that people can use if they want. And this would make it a lot easier to get a new Wiki jump-started without a bunch of copy/pasting.

-- LairdPopkin

: I think you're referring to the InterWiki links. To enable them, copy the "intermap" file to your $DataDir directory. You can also add your own links by editing that file. --CliffordAdams

No, InterWiki is working fine. It didn't occur to me that these were InterWiki links. Once I realized that (thanks to an email from Cliff), I added an InterWiki entry for the local site, with the URL ending in a '?', and everything works fine now. Thanks!

-- DanMuller

A couple ideas....

include a built-in Self: InterWiki link for use in things like Self:action=index; that would be convenient for example pages copied from site to site, and the intermap file would not have to be modified to add the local site
provide two intermap-style files:
- a "global" file that theoretically could be periodically updated from a central site, sort of like the DNS cache, and provided with any software updates
- a "local" file (which could supersede the global file entries) that remains untouched by updates, strictly edited by the local sysadmin

OddMuse ships with a README file, and upon startup, when no parameters are given, and no homepage exists, it looks for the README file in the cgi-bin directory and in the data-directory, and renders it. If the user just unpacked the tarball, then this should work. The README file contains only the absolute basics, of course, but it's a start. -- AlexSchroeder

wiki on wiki documentation

One suggestion, it'd be nice if UseModWiki came with a sample wiki with documentation.

: You mean, like http://hytext.com/wikiframe.txt [BrokenLink, 01. Aug 2003] which is a basic UseMod wiki with all the initial pages in text format. Page names are set off with >>>>>>. Start with your home page, copy and paste relevant page text into the Edit box, click Save, and the links for the next page are created and ready to go. Takes about 6 minutes to build a basic site with full user documentation. -- JerryMuelver

Hey, cool. Thanks. It would still be nice if there was something distributed with UseModWiki so that people would have somewhere to start from.

To repeat myself from above, yep, I'd strongly suggest distributing a simple pre-built .zip file containing a 'starter database'. -- LairdPopkin

: One small hurdle to zipped setup structure is that permissions don't get set right on the server. I found when I recovered a crashed server database from my downloaded files, but FTP back to the server, that all the permissions had to be reset to "nobody" from the somebody they belonged to from the FTP proccess. You need help from the ISP staff, if you are not the ISP yourself. Perhaps the installation process could be done with a Perl script that read a source file like wikiframe.txt on the server and used it to create all the directories and starter pages with the proper permissions. -- JerryMuelver

usemod wiki functions documentation

I am new with wikis. I could not find a single place with documentation to the usemod-wiki-program. I had to look around in this wiki to find hints like the action=... commands. I do not know how to become an administrator. I do not know how to delete pages. There should be a UseModWikiDocumentation page. --ThomasBayen

While digging in this wiki I found the answers to my question. But there should really be a link from the main page and in the INSTALL file. --ThomasBayen

: You can add it yourself, where you think it belongs - this is the way a wiki evolves ! --HaJoGurt

We could create a tarballable (via a script) UseModWiki install here on usemod.com which could be the "gold edition." No content would be "allowed" on this wiki unless it was intended to be tarballed as a /StartPackage, as determined by the UseModWiki community. One concern would be the default configuration. I think it should use WikiWiki CamelCase, for instance, but others might want to employ FreeLinks. This alone might be enough to make it fail unless a decent compromise could be made. -- SunirShah