Offline Document Database

Can I use a document database created with TWiki offline?

I need to have a document database that can be downloaded to a laptop and used outdoors in the field. I mean practically in the woods. No internet or anything else avalable. Can this be done?

-- Contributors: JuhaVaisasvaara - 03 Nov 2006

Discussion

I use a portable version of TWiki that I keep on an external harddrive. You could even put it on a USB flash disk if you wanted to pay for a big enough thumbdrive. The way it works is to use the VMware image of TWiki so you can install VMware on different machines and then it becomes portable between those machines. This is very handy from a reference point-of-view. For a field application where you have your main database on a server, you would just mirror the server before you went offline and then run it as a local VMware server on your 'offline' laptop.

Besides that method of doing things, I am also interested in having the document database usable WITHOUT TWiki actually running. I know this can't be that hard to do but I haven't seen anything about anyone doing it or thinking about it. The idea I envisioned was that you could run an automated script overnight that renders every page (in the TWiki webs selected) into a single file per page (like an mht archive that IE uses--these are not that hard to create natively). The .mht file would include all content and attachment for that page, and all other pages in that web would be linked correctly to other .mht pages. None of the TWiki searching functionality would work, but you'd still be able to navigate between static pages and have a usable reference database for someone that wanted a copy without having to do ANYTHING with TWiki. I think this would be a really great 'export' feature to make TWiki information available to non-adopters and for backup purposes. Anyone with comments on the feasibility of such an effort please chime in!

-- JoshuaJohnston - 03 Nov 2006

You can already do this, using the PublishContrib to generate static HTML.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 03 Nov 2006

Crawford, that's excellent! Thanks for the link!

-- JoshuaJohnston - 04 Nov 2006

Some more info:

• There are more choices to export content, such as the PublishWebPlugin. See Tag:export.
• Offline mode and data replication has been been discussed many times, there is also a prototype to synchronize content. See Tag:replication.
• TWiki is very well suited for doc autoring. Some people (including myself) use TWikiForBookAuthoring. See Tag:documentation.

-- PeterThoeny - 04 Nov 2006