Question

I've had a perfectly fine TWiki20040902 installation running for a while, and suddenly the variables are not being evaluated anymore. Basically the site still works, but it looks pretty weird! The page begins with plaintext %HTTP_EQUIV_ON_VIEW% %BROADCASTMESSAGE% %WIKILOGOALT% (I added NOP tags in the quote to make it render on this page) instead of actually showing the proper skin and variable values.

This happened after I made an edit to the TWikiPreferences page, but it still looks right to me and I don't find any errors in it. Attached is the testenv and the TWikiPreferences just to be sure.

I run a few more TWikis on the same host, and they work fine. The provider has not recently upgraded anything.

Environment

-- TorbenGB - 24 Jan 2005

Answer

How did you edit your TWiki.TWikiPreferences topic? The attached file shows the bullets unrendered, e.g. something is wrong with the whitespace of the topic text. The saved topic text has tabs converted to space. Look at the raw file (from the shell), bullets with settings should be TAB, TAB, asterisk, SPACE, "Set NAME = ..., not SPACE, SPACE, SPACE, SPACE, SPACE, SPACE, asterisk, SPACE, "Set NAME = ...

Fix the whitespace, or roll back the topic revision (see administration notes at the end of twiki/lib/TWiki.cfg/)

-- PeterThoeny - 25 Jan 2005

Fix the whitespace -- Bingo! Thanks Peter! I can only guess how this happened. Sometimes (often!) the edit mode won't save the topic, it just spins forever and sometimes ends with an error. This only happens with long topics, like *Preferences. Sometimes I edit the topic via FTP instead. That must have messed up the whitespace. I should probably figure out what causes the save-error on long topics instead.

-- TorbenGB - 25 Jan 2005