SID-02463: twiki conversion to html

Status:	Answered	TWiki version:		Perl version:
Category:		Server OS:	Windows	Last update:	5 years ago

Hi,

I've just been handed a zip of a twiki site. All of the 184 the files are .txt and are not easily readable. My company uses Confluence pages and would like to be able to convert the twiki pages to a readable format such as html.

Is there any conversion utility available?

Thanks

Pippa

-- Pippa Crawshaw - 2020-12-22

Discussion and Answer

That depends on how sophisticated your TWiki has been used, and whether and how you want to continue to work with the TWiki content in the future. Anyway, the best utility to convert TWiki sources to HTML is TWiki itself (because that's basically what it does all day). A TWiki HTML page is built from several files (templates, style sheets, include mechanisms, and more), some of which are provide by a TWiki installation, some might be provided in your zip file. So, any static conversion will be "lossy" to some extent.

You can, of course, just install TWiki and run it as a server, then drop the contents of the zip to the appropriate places in TWiki's data and pub directories, and off you go. That might well be the easiest way to do it.

If you don't want to install a web server (like Apache HTTPD), then you can use a pure-Perl installation with PSGIEngineContrib (I am running my "home web server" on a Raspberry Pi that way) and still enjoy all TWiki functionality with a browser, including dynamic searches and TWiki applications.

If you just want static HTML pages for individual sources, you can use TWiki's command line interface like this: perl -I lib -Ibin -T bin/view Main/WebHome > somewhere/WebHome.html. HTML pages you create in that way will refer to style sheets and JavaScript files which are available in a TWiki installation: without those the result is good enough to read the contents of a single page, but with a weird appearance. Worse, links between TWiki pages won't work - and those are often the most valuable part of a wiki.

-- Harald Jörg - 2020-12-22

If you have TWiki installed you can look into the PublishContrib or PublishWebPlugin to generate HTML. Both extensions link pages properly.

Another option is to let the pages be crawled recursively using curl or the like.

You could also engage one of the TWikiConsultants to do the work for you.

-- Peter Thoeny - 2020-12-23

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