Using TWiki

Updates

• 9/5/08 - Added login issues, appearance issues, and online surveys to the list of topics to investigate. Investigated skins.

• 9/4/08 - Started project page as "Main/RickManning". Recorded list of issues to investigate, and started looking into the basics of how TWiki works. Found a reference manual on the Twiki.org site with lots of good information.

Issues to Address

How does TWiki work? What underlying technology does it use, and how is internal storage handled?

Rice RAP is currently using TWiki 4.0.0, released Wed, 08 Feb 2006, and Plugin API version 1.1. The most recent version is TWiki 4.2.2.

• Note: How difficult would it be to update the Twiki? Is it a good idea?

For a good reference on how TWiki works, see the TWiki 4.0.0 Reference Manual for System Administrators.

To be investigated further.

Login issues.

To be investigated.

What's a good place to find out about existing security problems and how to deal with them? How is security handled, and what are common security problems?

For a list of "security alerts" for different versions of TWiki, see TWiki Security Alerts.

To be investigated further.

How does access control work and can it be spoofed?

See TWiki User Authentication and TWiki Access Control.

To be investigated further.

Can we do general purpose programming on our TWiki?

TWiki Plugins, written in Perl, can be used for some programming needs.

TWiki Scripts appear to have more low-level functionality, such as renaming, moving, and editing large numbers of topics.

To be investigated further.

Can we get notifications for web page changes in a good format?

TWiki 4.0.0 has a service called Web Notify that can be used to notify subscribers of edited topics. Requires MailerContrib.

To be investigated further.

What are the tradeoffs?

To be investigated.

How can we make TWiki look more polished?

Use skins.

To change the default look and feel, we would probably create our own custom skin. Then, "to make the changes visible on all pages, go to TWikiPreferences (to keep TWikiPreferences intact) and write: * Set COVER = myskin "

It looks like making a custom skin is pretty simple. We can use built-in features and/or CSS to define the layout. We might not be able to achieve quite the polished look of a static, non-wiki website, but we can definitely come much closer.

To be investigated further.

How does one become a "power user" of the wiki?

To be investigated.

How well can you couple a wiki document with a wiki presentation so that you can co-evolve either of them in parallel to the other?

To be investigated.

Can we make an online survey a la Surveymonkey with TWiki?

To be investigated.