1. Is there a proper way to do a rename of a web in BeijingRelease?
2. Can we use the implementation written by PeterNixon in MegaTWiki?

-- MartinCleaver - 06 May 2003

Problems with the approach of renaming the directory in ManagingWebs:

1. It reintroduces the OneWebMasterSyndrome (Contrary to TWikiMission)
2. It doesn't work.
   • Incoming links from other webs become broken and there is no way of telling what links have been broken.

Michael - perhaps you can put PeterNixon's implementation in your TWikiUnixInstaller distribution? (While you are there, can you post a patch here? I can't yet use your distribution as I don't have root access).

-- MartinCleaver - 06 Jul 2003

Anyone thought more about this?

We could do with it to RenameTheMainWeb

-- MartinCleaver - 07 Feb 2004

Hi Martin,

I missed this first time round - sorry . I agree, something like this would be sensible - as you probably know I've been working on merging MegaTWiki anyway, first into a recent TWiki alpha and then into the shared codebase. I posted some of the initial results to the MegaTWiki topic, given it's a stated focus of DakarRelease (haven't checked recently who stated it).

It's also worth noting as well that much of the work needed to do this has already been done by Peter & John (essentially the code that would be needed inside the inner loop). It would be interesting to see how well PeterNixon's code merges with this. (Essentially this actually an specific instance of mass rename).

Since this is a feature in MegaTWiki - the stated focus of DakarRelease - I've changed the scheduled for option below. If this steps of toes, change it back.

-- MS - 07 Feb 2004

I'm taking another peek at this. I'll post a patch against Dakar and Cairo.

-- PeterNixon - 28 Jun 2005

Does this functionality belong in the core or should it be implemented as a plugin or addon? My gut feel is it should be part of the core, but we need a good home for it. I can add it into Rename.pm, but it will require some level of code and template refactoring.

-- PeterNixon - 29 Jun 2005

Definitely part of the core. In the DEVELOP codebase the UI should be in Manage.pm, but the base functionality should sit alongside createWeb and removeWeb in Store.pm (renameWeb). Are you proposing to pull the same kind of trick as is done for topic renaming i.e. scraping out the references to the web and converting them? Might be tricky.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 30 Jun 2005

All set. I've implemented it exactly that way (converting references to the moved web) in Manage.pm on the MultiLevelWikiWebs branch. You have to do the reformatting before doing the move (as apposed to the normal way), so I had to add a check to see if the move would be possible first. The whole bit ended up very similar to doing a single topic move, but the permissions checking is a bit tricky. I ended up using $TWiki::cfg{WebPrefsTopicName} as the topic to check against for rename permissions.

One big problem I see is if someone implements a database backend (non directory-structure based storage), we'll need an abstracted way of moving the data between webs; I ended up just using "mv -f" to move the pub and data directories via Store.pm, since we don't have a webHandler yet.

-- PeterNixon - 03 Jul 2005

BTW, I'm not planning to implement this in CairoRelease anymore unless there's a huge demand for it.

-- PeterNixon - 03 Jul 2005

This functionality has been merged into the DEVELOP branch, and can be accessed via the "More topic actions" link on each page, for lack of a better place to put it.

-- PeterNixon - 04 Jul 2005

Wow, great functionality.

Fro the link location: How about WebPreferences? "You are in the WebName Web. [Rename this web]". 'cause the "more topic actions" is full enough as it is, IMO.

-- JosMaccabiani - 04 Jul 2005

WebPreferences does sound more appropriate. I'll wedge it in there.

-- PeterNixon - 04 Jul 2005

Done. There's a Tools: section in WebPreferences now which provides access to RenameWeb functionality for each web (including _default).

-- PeterNixon - 04 Jul 2005