Question

folks,

having to use web-browser in interactive fashion to make each little modification is a bit painful.

is there a way to have twiki reder the files that are maintained outside the twiki (but still accessible to the twiki server)?

thanks,

-badari

Environment

-- BadariKakumani - 18 Apr 2005

Answer

What kind of files are they?

-- LynnwoodBrown - 18 Apr 2005

TWiki files are just text files (ascii) containing TWikiML, which you can store where you want to.

I.e. if you have a directory of files in /home/badari/twikitextfiles, there is no problem in making a link in the twiki directory structure, making the directory appear as a web there (making ../data/Badari a link to it or smth).

You will have trouble with versioning, unless you version your files in the same way TWiki does, using the RCS utility. You might prefer making the webservers access read-only, making all the files always appear to be revision 1.1. You can disable writeaccess to webusers if you make a "WebPreferences.txt" in your directory with the proper rights set. That way, things won't "clutter up", everything will be v1.1 always, and people won't start editing something they won't be allowed to save in the end.

Other ways to accomplish about the same could be OfflineWiki or EditTWikiExternalEditorAddOnDev (which are both preferable imho).

Please comment.

-- SteffenPoulsen - 19 Apr 2005

Hi steffen,

thanks for the detailed info. making a ../data/Badari link did the trick. didn't know that creating a new web and topics in the web is as easy as that and we were not forced to use the cvs/rcs control.

the external editor twiki needs to be checked out. but i am skeptic since i don't use editors on my laptop ; but the browser i DO use from my laptop. so the external editor would mean that i start using my laptop env (as opposed to my unix server environment).

regarding offline wiki, not sure if you can easily render the TWikiML files that are offline and get a sense of how your offline files look when rendered.

so making ../data/Badari link was what i needed. thanks for pointing me to that.

-badari

-- BadariKakumani - 20 Apr 2005