Question

I recently learned that nested (aka "sub) webs are possbile in TWiki 4. Yippee.

At the Company where I work, we have many "department" pages within a very large and steadily growing division "web". I would love to move our pages into a subweb. Unfortunately, those pages are full of links to other pages in the larger web.

Is there a way to allow a subweb to "see" into the enclosing web for link resolution?

Specifically, our pages are currently in the Meda web. So we can reference Media.SomeTopic as SomeTopc. We do this in many many places.

If we create a subweb of Media, initial tests indicate that all of the links to pages that don't move into the new web will break.

Is there anything we can do easily to solve this problem and ensure that "upward" links don't break? (Recommendations for "fix-it" scripts that run on the server are acceptable if that's the only option but I don't have server access, so running such scripts would pose a political problem)

Environment

-- VickiBrown - 07 Apr 2007

Answer

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Vicki, In the process of prototyping a DatabaseStore, I'm going to need to be able to copy complete webs around, and along the way, I hope to make it possible to select a set of topics to another web.

When that code happens, it would have to rename the links to all those topics, as well - I'm envisioning quite alot of work in completeing this work (i'm up to 2-4 man months total at the moment), but I'm trying to get a feel for what functionalities are needed the most, and of course, where I can fund the work from (yep, i'm looking for sponsorship here too).

because its a long running task to move and re-link a large number of topics, i am expecting to have to fork a sub-process....

OK, planning aside - currently you could use the FindElsewherePlugin

-- SvenDowideit - 07 Apr 2007

Yes, the FindElsewherePlugin is a way to add a web search path to WikiWord links.

If you move a set of topics one by one, links will be fixed across webs. However, this is not practical if you have to move 100 topics.

In this case you can move the topics on the shell level. Move all data/Oldweb/TopicsToMove* to data/Newweb/, and all pub/Oldweb/TopicsToMove* to pub/Newweb/. Links between moved topics are OK, but links to/from the set of moved topics will be broken. You can look into the GlobalReplacePlugin that can fix content across many topics.

-- PeterThoeny - 09 Apr 2007

Using FindElsewherePlugin, what's the expected auto-link behavior in a hierarchical web configuration? For example, if I have a Foo/Bar subweb with a GazonkOmatic topic in it, what should FindElsewherePlugin do with the following WikiWords:

1. GazonkOmatic
2. Bar.GazonkOmatic
3. Foo.Bar.GazonkOmatic

Both Foo and Foo/Bar are in LOOKELSEWHEREWEBS.

In my installation (4.2.0 RC2), (1) and (3) resolve as expected, but (2) doesn't. This becomes a problem if Foo and Bar were originally on the same level, and I then move Bar below Foo as described by Peter.

-- ClausBrod - 16 Jan 2008