SID-02471: Best practices for organizing Webs

Status:	Answered	TWiki version:	6.1.0	Perl version:
Category:	CategoryDeployment	Server OS:		Last update:	4 years ago

To simplify upgrading to new versions of TWiki, since the TWiki and Main webs are part of each release, is it best to avoid changes to the TWiki web and the Main Web? Should all user specific pages be in one or more separate webs?

-- Kurt Rosenhagen - 2021-07-08

Discussion and Answer

The TWiki web contains the user documentation for the current version, so I would advise to take it from the distribution and avoid too many changes. If you can clarify or otherwise improve the documentation, you can do so, but also consider sharing the changes with twiki.org so that they can be part of future releases. The Main web contains information about your current users, and also your site-specific preferences, so you need to keep the contents when upgrading. The contents of the Main web which come with a new release are mostly for "bootstrapping" a new installation.

For actual content I prefer to have separate webs, this makes the lifecycle management a lot easier. How many of them - that depends on how diverse your audience is. The RSS feeds, the WebChanges page and the search operate on one single web, so if you have more webs, your audience can easily chose what to focus on. It is a trade-off between "I need to check too many feeds to collect all information I need" and "I'm drowning in irrelevant links" which also depends on how proliferate your community is.

-- Harald Jörg - 2021-07-08

Thanks Harald, you're confirming what I thought. I expected this was the case. It seems that many smaller installations load most content into the Main web instead of new top level webs. I did realize that there is not much content in the Main web distribution and that users and preferences would be updated in the installed Main web.

Kurt

-- Kurt Rosenhagen - 2021-07-13

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