A TWiki Installation on Windows 2003

Here are some random notes on my installation of this wonderful piece of software. I must say, TWiki is work in progress; but that's why I like it so much - I've learnt lots and lots tinkering around, watching as it evolves into a very sensible system.

RCS

My RCSLite is not behaving as it should. It appears to be intended operation after some release. The thing is, small changes don't appear to get logged, even though they are saved. A decimal revision number would be just fine for this, but it appears to pull only whole, major revision numbers.

Statistics.pm

Statistics have worked on and off along the Dakar releases. With 4.0.4 calling 'force update' started refreshing every Web, and the link to go back where one had come from pointed invariably to the Trash Web stats. According to the comments, whether one Web or the whole installation was updated depended on the call to inside Statistics.pm. It happened that I was getting every Web refreshed, so the last Web was always on the link. I suppose the instanciation of session objects or something else was having side-effects. A quick change in Statistics.pm solved the issue, but may have brought others on..

ContributorsPlugin

I had to get this from SVN, since the stable version wasn't playing with 4.0.4.

CommentsPlugin

This one went fairly smooth.

ChartPlugin

Well, this one was quite a piece of work. If you're in Linux, compiling the GD module is a trivial thing. Now, on Windows it requires a bit more know-how than I had.. fortunately, there's a compiled PPM module at www.bribes.org. I'd still like to understand how it's done, anyway. I had Dev-Cpp (along with libz, libpng and libjpeg), libgd, and the GD source from CPAN. But I never got past the Makefile.pl..

PloticusPlugin and EasyTimelinePlugin

These are also very nice tools. Unfortunately, the ploticus build for Windows is a stone in the shoe. The version available from Sourceforge is GIF-, SVG- and EPS-capable. Now, most browsers are not SVG-enabled, so either I stuck to GIF, or compiled my own binary.

Compile my own binary I did, using the Dev-Cpp command-line tools. I managed to get a PNG,SVG,EPS enabled version, but I had to drop GIF support. This was a bit problematic later on.

• PloticusPlugin is hardcoded to PNG format, which caused errors; also, Sandbox.pm was a bit overly protective, and I kept getting invalid parameter errors.
• EasyTimelinePlugin detects the running OS, and sets GIF for Windows. Now, since my ploticus.exe couldn't do GIF, I got stuck and had to change the code.

TagMePlugin

Windows is a very peculiar piece of work. I must say I enjoy tweaking the system a lot: shutting down services, removing unneeded system files, making some cosmetics changes.. it feels like bricolage! Then you find something like moths on the closet: Internet Explorer has issues with the 'tags' word being used inside attributes. I had seen something similar with folder names (though cygwin could read them, Windows Explorer always tried to 'mount' them).

So, it being that the TagsPlugin uses 'tags', I had to change the code to be able to have pages render properly in IE.

This plugin had some issues with NT domain user names. Not to wonder, given the windows penchant for backslashes. A working patch for the regular expression parser was posted on the development topic by some friendly chaps.

Operational Issues

Operational? Well, maybe not...

1. I can't seem to bring my users to edit text; there is an intrinsic aversion to 'learning a new language'. Well, I hear the same comment regarding LaTeX or bash - people feel more comfortable around buttons and dialog boxes, even though they can be confusing, harder to use and lack functionality. Does anyone share this experience? Any success in bringing users over to use more keyboard and less mouse?

1. After many years thinking in terms of folders and files, it is a bit boggling getting to grips with a flat web, which one can even fashion to be hierarchical (through parenting or container topics). Are there any nice experiences with any particular organisation?

• Name: Renato Serodio
• Email:
• Company Name:
• Company URL:
• Country: Germany
• City: Munich
• Hear From:

My Links

• WelcomeGuest to learn TWiki
• Sandbox web to try out TWiki
• RenatoSerodioSandbox just for me

Personal Preferences (details in TWikiVariables)

• Show tool-tip topic info on mouse-over of WikiWord links, on or off: (see details in TWikiPreferences)
  • Set LINKTOOLTIPINFO = off
• Horizontal size of text edit box:
  • Set EDITBOXWIDTH = 70
• Vertical size of text edit box:
  • Set EDITBOXHEIGHT = 22
• Style of text edit box. width: 99% for full window width (default), width: auto to disable.
  • Set EDITBOXSTYLE = width: 99%

Related topics

• ChangePassword
• TWikiPreferences has site-level preferences of TWiki.
• WebPreferences has preferences of the TWiki.Main web.
• TWikiUsers has a list of other TWiki users.