Question

If I use TWiki as a colloborative document creation tool, I would like to be able to make a printable snapshot by date. Is there any easy way to create a BookView by date? I notice that WebSearch doesn't seem to allow searching by arbitrary dates.

-- RobertBagwill - 17 Oct 2002

Answer

This would be quite hard to do - one idea would be to use GenHTMLAddon to extract the TWiki site or BookView to static HTML periodically, e.g. every day from a cron job. Or you could try for TWikiWithCVS, which has been discussed on Codev but would involve major programming - CVS supports this sort of thing very well.

-- RichardDonkin - 17 Oct 2002

This is actually an interesting idea. Travelling back in time, not unlike the WaybackMachine.

Not sure if RCS offers that, but it could be implemented without too much effort in case RCS has a parameter to specify a date instead of a version number to retrieve an older version.

-- PeterThoeny - 19 Oct 2002

I snap our web pages with htmldoc. Make sure you put a document with a <h1> as the first document if you use book mode. It works pretty well, and you can prevent people from changing it.

-- JohnRouillard - 26 Oct 2002

One of my colleagues asked for this same ability, so I whacked out a basic wayback mechanism. Starting from scratch, it took me about four hours to trace and add the necessary hooks.

To do this as a true alteration of /bin/view, would require changes that I'm not prepared to sponsor, however copying /bin/view to /bin/wayback and then hacking that was relatively painless.

Changes were also required to TWiki.pm, Store.pm, and RcsWrap.pm but those changes are merely copy/paste-and-add-ByDate. The hacky implementation I've ended up with allows either .../bin/wayback/Web/Topic?wbdate=yyyymmdd syntax (propogation of ?wbdate=yyyymmdd syntax is not made to internal links however), or setting the pref ___* Set WAYBACK = yyyymmdd (setting the pref forces all page views using /bin/wayback to be shown using the specific era).

-- RichardWilliamson - 14 Sep 2004