TWiki External Editor

Limitations

Currently edittwiki does not parse the attached forms for TWiki topics which means that when you save the page, it will be saved without the form data. This feature is being added and is targetted for the next (1.1.3) release.

Prerequisites

You must have installed a current JRE/JDK for your platform and the java executable should be in your path. To test this, run java -version from a command prompt. You should get a response from your java installation with its release information.

This has been tested on Windows XP and should work on any platform that has a recent java JDK/JRE.

Installation

editTwiki is written in python and compiled into a java jar using Jython which makes it a regular java application packaged into a jar.

To install it, unzip the distribution into an installation directory. Next add the distribution's bin directory to your path and add the edittwiki.jar file to your CLASSPATH. Next, define the EDITTWIKI environment variable to point to to the edittwiki.cfg config file and edit the config file to reflect the twiki installation you want to use it with. Once you are setup, run the following:

edittwiki --help

This should display the usage information. You are done and ready to work.

Edittwiki defaults to using notepad as your editor. To set your own editor, define the EDITOR variable to the full path to your editor of choice. For example:

SET EDITOR=c:\tools\vim\vim63\gvim.exe

Usage

The basic commands are follows:

edittwiki -H host_section -T Web.Topic

If you have defined a twiki host section in your config file pointing to the twiki.org site, you would use this as follows:

edittwiki -H twiki -T Main.MyUserHomePage

edittwiki.cfg

The purpose of the config file is allow you to setup the connection details for the TWiki sites you use in advance. This keeps the amount of typing down to a minimum.

The following is a sample config file:

[general]
host=twiki.org
protocol=http
userid=YourId
password=YourPassw0rd

[local]
host=localhost:8080
protocol=http
[external]
host=external.wiki.com 
subdir=/twiki
cgibin=bin
protocol=http
userid=YourId
password=YouPassw0rd

host=my.weird.server.com:8080

http://my.server.org/bin/view/Main/MyTopic

http://my.server.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/MyTopic

cgibin=bin

Feedback and Questions

I have tried to test this as extensively as I can, but doubtless there are many bugs and assumptions which will cause issues for others with their individual TWiki installations. Please provide any feedback you may have to (etaekema at earthlink dot net).