SID-02156: Prevent non-WikiWords in Topic Names

Status:	Asked	TWiki version:	6.0.2	Perl version:
Category:	CategoryEditing	Server OS:	Ubuntu Linux	Last update:	9 years ago

I have found that renaming topics and webs with single word-names to be problematic.

And even though I tell my users not to do it, they still name topics and webs with single words ("Beef" rather than "DeadBeef", and so on).

Is there any way to prevent, without exception, single-word topic and web names from even being created? I've looked for a preference or a plugin, but I'm not finding anything.

-- TWiki Guest - 2016-02-22

Discussion and Answer

I don't know of a way to absolutely prevent creation of single-word topics without altering the code - after all, it is a feature of TWiki to allow single-word topics if desired. However, you can make it "difficult" to create such topics by customizing the interfaces: The scripts edit, rename and copy have parameters to enforce wiki names. Usually, users don't enter URLs to these scripts manually, they rather use TWiki's user interface to create new topics (WebCreateNewTopic) or to rename/copy ("More topic actions"). Whether the user interface shows the parameter to allow single-word topics or not is just a matter of the corresponding TWiki templates - or a skin - which can be customized. Documentation is in TWikiTemplates and TWikiSkins - I admit that I am not an expert on that matter.

For single-word webs - that's different. TWiki's own webs like TWiki, Support, Sandbox all are single-word names. I don't think web names can be enforced to be wiki names.

-- Harald Jörg - 2016-02-23

Thanks, Harald. That's too bad, since I have found that the TWiki renamer does, essentially, a find/replace on the Web name if I rename a Web. If I had a Web named "Guest", for instance, and decided to rename it to "SomethingElse", then every occurrence of the string "Guest" gets replaced with "SomethingElse", whether it is part of a URI or not. It's a real problem!

-- TWiki Guest - 2016-02-24

If renaming a web renames unrelated text you found a bug. Please file a bug report at TWikibug:WebHome if you can describe this in a reproducible manner.

-- Peter Thoeny - 2016-02-26

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