Question Feedback

twiki/bin/configure is great! A few little suggestions though: (1) I found the expanding section interaction style confusing. At first I thought I was going to a different page when I merely expanded a section. The hierarchical structure of the page is not at all visually evident. How about putting a familiar little "+" to the left of the unexpanded section titles and slightly indenting the expanded section?

Bugs:Item1866 CC

(2) When something is wrong (either a warning or error), it would be helpful if there were guidance about how and where to fix it, e.g., in which file.

Can you be more explicit? Which particular errors gave you trouble? CC

Sure. One example: The warning generated if {ScriptUrlPath} is wrong:

This is the 'cgi-bin' part of URLs used to access the TWiki bin directory e.g. /twiki/bin

See http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki.ShorterURLCookbook for more information on setting up TWiki to use shorter script URLs.
Warning: I expected this to look like "/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/dbooth/twiki/bin"

I now know that I can either set this directly in twiki/lib/LocalSite.cfg, or I can set it from the twiki/bin/configure page in my browser if the web server has write access to twiki/lib/LocalSite.cfg. However, as a newbie initially trying to install, it took me a little while to figure this out. Since this applies to many (all?) of the variables displayed by twiki/bin/configure, perhaps the best solution would be to note this at the top of the twiki/bin/configure page. -- DavidBooth - 20 Mar 2006

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I have a warning about "patch" not being the gnu version. I do have gnu patch available as gpatch, but don't see any way to tell twiki to use this instead. I looked briefly at the code and see that the word "patch" is hard coded. How about making "patch" be a customizable variable? It would be nice to have the warm fuzzies of no warnings.

Bugs:Item1867 CC

In the warning about {UseLocale}, "Warning: Unable to set locale to 'c'. The actual locale is 'C' - please test your locale settings. This warning can be ignored if you are not planning to use locales (e.g. your site uses English only) - or you can set {Site}{Locale} to C, which should always work.", the letter "C" near the end of the sentence looks like a lower case "c" on the page, apparently because it is in a different font than the rest of the sentence. This caused me to incorrectly set it to lower case "c" in an attempt to get rid of the warning. Perhaps it should use the same font as the rest of the sentence, in order to prevent this problem? Or perhaps add 'Note: The locale "C" is an upper case "C".'

Bugs:Item1868 CC

I was confused on the security setup, and still don't know if made the right choices. I wanted a basic security setup (presumably using the Apache web domain password mechanism), but the structure and terminology of the TWiki User Authentication page in the User Guide ( wiki/bin/view.pl/TWiki/TWikiUserAuthentication ) does not match the structure of settings presented by twiki/bin/configure. For example, the doc says "There are three basic options; no login, login via a TWiki login page, and login using the webserver authentication support", but dropdown list for {LoginManager} on the configure page lists none, TWiki::Client::ApacheLogin and TWiki::Client::TemplateLogin. Do these correspond to "no login, login via a TWiki login page, and login using the webserver authentication support"? It would be helpful if the correspondence were explicit.

Bugs:Item1869 CC

Re: TWikiPreferences, I have no idea which of these I really need to set and which can reasonably be left with defaults. It would be helpful if the ones that really need setting were clearly identified.

The noun "TWiki" is often used. However, it isn't clear whether it refers to (a) the TWiki engine (software), (b) the resulting wiki (or web) that is created by the TWiki engine, or (c) the twiki.org site. For example, in TWikiPreferences, I don't know if I should set WIKIWEBMASTER to my email address or leave it as Peter Thoeny's email address.

The instructions at http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/TWikiInstallationGuide have a link to TWikiPreferences ( http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/TWikiPreferences ). After spending an hour or so reading through that TWikiPreferences document, it suddenly occurred to me that I could probably copy and paste the tail end of that URL onto my TWiki web URL to view my own settings. I tried it and (after adding file extension ".pl" in my case) worked! It would be helpful if TWikiInstallationGuide could say this.

One general issue is that it is hard to distinguish what is supposed to be my own web from what is default material that comes with TWiki. My new TWiki-driven wiki looks very much like the TWiki site, which is confusing. It would make sense for administrative things to look like the TWiki site, but it would be helpful if the parameters that control the branding on my wiki were clearly consolidated somewhere, so that I could easily know what to change (perhaps leaving a "Powered by TWiki" or something).

BTW, one time-consuming task in getting twiki running on my hosted site (no root access) was trying to figure out which set of instructions I should follow.

Bugs:Item1870 CC

I hope I haven't given too many comments and suggestions. And I hope after I have become more familiar with TWiki that I will be able to contribute something to this awesome software. Thanks for making it available!

-- DavidBooth - 13 Mar 2006

Environment

-- DavidBooth - 13 Mar 2006

Answer

Thank you very much David for the detailed feedback, this helps in improving the documentation.

I moved David Booth's feedback from FeedbackToPeterThoeny to here in the hope that some of it gets taken back into DEVELOP. Probably good to open a few Bugs items.

-- PeterThoeny - 14 Mar 2006

Super feedback, thanks David, it's always nice to have your work appreciated. If you have any ideas for improvements, please feel free to add them as brainstorming ideas to Codev web, or if they are specific minor fixes/improvements, you can add them directly to Bugs web as enhancements. I have captured items for most of your comments, as indicated by the bug numbers above.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 14 Mar 2006