Upgrade Notes of TWikiReleaseSpring2001

Each TWiki release has TWikiUpgradeGuide. This topic is to compile the upgrade items, "gotchas" that need to be documented for people who will upgrade from the 01 Dec 2000 release.

Upgrade items:

• SelectableNewTopicTemplates: Retired notedited.tmpl, notext.tmpl and notwiki.tmpl templates. Need to create a WebTopicEditTemplate for each web that has a custom notedited.tmpl template.
• Format changed of %GMTIME{"..."}% and %SERVERTIME{"..."}% variables. Format is now "$hour:$min" instead of "hour:min". More in TWikiVariables.
• Customized templates and skins need to be upgraded to the new template format. The safest way is to use the new templates as a base and to merge your changes back. Changes in new templates:
  • Change format from HTML to XHTML
  • Templates are now rendered by TWiki, you can use any TextFormattingRules you like. But you need to escape unwanted ones; and you need to remove empty lines unless you want a =<p /> tag added.
  • Added MetaDataRendering
• The FormTemplateSystem replaces TWikiCategoryTable
  • A form template must be created in each Web that uses a category table
  • Searches will need to be changed to deal with format change - if all topics are upgrades a more specific search can be done
• Rename changes
  • If you are using .htaccess then add the rename script
  • You might want to add [ALLOW|DENY][WEB|TOPIC]RENAME in some places e.g. to TWiki06x01TWikiPreferences, WebPreferences and TWikiUsers

Hints and "gotchas":

• ExtendingTableSyntax: Enhanced table syntax might have unwanted side effect: | *bold* | cells, |  center aligned  | and |   right aligned | cells, span multiple columns using | empty cells |||. More in TextFormattingRules.
• Use Net::SMTP module instead of sendmail if installed.
• Use <verbatim> ... </verbatim> tags instead of <pre> ... </pre> tags where appropriate. More in TextFormattingRules.
• New variable %STARTINCLUDE% and %STOPINCLUDE% variables to control what gets included of a topic. More in TWikiVariables.
• Attachments are now stored using MetaDataDefinition. Upgrade is done automatically on topic save. "In memory" upgrade is done on topic view.
• Attachments are now under revision control, $attachAsciiPath in TWiki.cfg defines which file types are stored in ASCII. Otherwhise binary format is used. This means that the RCS version used should support binary files.
• Handling for topic specific templates like edit.new.tmpl has been removed and replaced by template topics (see TWikiTemplates)
• There's now a file warning.txt that can appear in the data directory. Look in here as it may show problems that need fixing. It is possible this file could get fairly big if your installation is in a bad way, so might need occasional deletion.

-- PeterThoeny - 15 Jul 2001

-- JohnTalintyre - 27 Jun 2001

I've attached some upgrade notes that I wrote for our local site on going from May 2000 release to March 2001 Beta. They are quite user-oriented, so might be useful as part of improved help docs, perhaps. See UpgradeMay2000toMarch2001.txt

By the way... Can I suggest that the Attach code should use the new [[...]] style links? And that it doesn't include the <br>, unless there is a good rationale for including this?

• [ PeterThoeny - 15 Jul 2001 ] - [[...]] style links sounds good. How about creating a bullet when the include link checkbox is set? That way the <br> can be dropped. The idea is to have a presentable list if multiple files are uploaded.

-- RichardDonkin - 13 Jul 2001

Not sure if everyone would want a bullet, but that does sound better in most cases, as the pages where I use attachments sometimes have a bullet per attached document.

It would also be better IMO if the link added to the page used the comment as the link name - that way the filename of the link is hidden.

Probably both of these features should be configurable, since they are to some extent a matter of taste. Not too important for this release, though, so if you want to stick with <br> it's not a big deal.

-- RichardDonkin - 15 Jul 2001

When upgrading people will need to change a lot of topic in the TWiki Web. I'm planning to do using a diff/merge tool, but havn't tried it out yet as:

• not sure how to grab the file off TWiki.org
• some topics still not in place

-- JohnTalintyre - 18 Jul 2001

We could use TWikiGuest's ReadWriteOfflineTWiki rsync mechanism to keep the TWiki Web of TWiki installations in-step with those on TWiki.org. We would probably want to maintain separate versions of the docs for each version of TWiki though.

-- MartinCleaver - 08 Aug 2001

Can the CoreTeam please consider adding EasierExternalLinking, i.e. the ability to write external links like this: [[http://www.yahoo.com/ Yahoo]] ? This makes linking much easier and is a one line change. I've been using this for almost a month and can't go back to the normal syntax. Wasn't sure where to raise this, sorry if this is not the place (but I saw the other discussion of link format here!).

-- RichardDonkin - 08 Aug 2001

I find that I use <br> a lot when editing TWiki pages, how about a TWiki carriage return syntax? Could be like a bullet at the end of a line "---*" (- = a space)? (Not sure if this is the right place for this suggestion.)

-- SteveRoe - 13 Aug 2001