Re: Wiki

On Wednesday 02 March 2005 08:42 pm, Alan Horkan wrote:
> Can you drop the Twiki graphic?

Your ideas (and Birch's) sound good--they can make TWiki look (and work)
considerably better for Abiword.

I can't do any of this strictly by myself--deleting the TWiki graphic and tool
bar, etc. require changes to the template (one of the templates--TWiki
overloads the word template to apply to about three different things, iirc.)

I'd like to work towards improving the current wiki, assuming others are
willing to help where required.

I'll look in the TWiki documentation for the name of the (appropriate)
template file, then I'll ask Hubert to provide me (us) a copy. After it's
modified, we'll have to ask Hubert to put it back on the site. (And then
some testing will be required to confirm that it works, hopefully this won't
require too many iterations.)

I think we probably will also want to agree on what functionality to leave
accessible from a TWiki page. As a first attempt (with almost no thought),
we might get away with as few as two links: "Edit this Page" and "More TWiki
Functions" (which would link to a page with links to other non-page specific
funtions (like WebSearch, WebStatistics, WebPreferences,
TWikiRegistration...). I'm not immediately sure how to give access to other
page specific functions, like "Page History", I don't want to get into
creating another type of page view (which might require Perl/cgi work).

> The navigation bar really sticks out, and not in a good way. It has a
> distinctly different colour and is made up of three seperate parts.

Same thing, sounds like a good thing to do, we'll need to modify the template.

> Perhaps the organisation of the wiki would seem less confusing if it were
> moved to a subdomain like faq.abisource.com or something?

I like that for another reason--if we let Google crawl that domain, then we
can put a custom Google search widget on the search page. Does anybody know
what's up with Google--are we doing something to prevent them from crawling
abisource.org?

I don't know why, when I go to http://services.google.com/cobrand/free_trial
and choose "Sign me up for customizable Google Free Search!" then enter
abisource.org or www.abisource.org I get an error message that says,
essentially, Google doesn't index the site. Yet, when I do other Google
searches, I get hits on www.abisource.com. ??

> If mod rewrite is available it maybe it would be nice to simplify the
> paths and get rid of some of the superflous junk like "/twiki/bin/view/"
> and make more memorable addresses?

A couple things. Yup this can be done, and I promised to provide some
information to Hubert on how to do it from the twiki.org site. I'm pretty
sure I never provided any information to Hubert--sorry, Ill get back into it.

Aside: I started doing some research, got confused (like I did when I tried to
do it for my own twiki several years ago (now gone without a trace due to a
crash of a non-backed up disk--my bad (I do still have the disk, and have
thoughts of trying to recover the data some day)).

I'll write a separate email describing what I do (or think I) know, and look
for some help to get the rewrite rules firmed up.

One point I wanted to make here is that, for this purpose also, a separate
(sub) domain for the wiki would be helpful. But, I'll get into that more in
the separate email. (I presume we'd have to register (pay) for such a
sub-domain?)

regards,
Randy Kramer
Received on Thu Mar 3 14:47:18 2005