Question

This is a question of design of administrator roles in TWiki.

After having installed my first TWiki, I wondered what and where to customize. And I made mistakes, for which I am now due to pay.

Skins are easy. A simple addition in the templates directory, and only to be done by someone having direct access to the files. Almost no problem when upgrading.

Now what about the documents? I have come to the conclusion that changing anything in the TWiki web is a bad idea: It makes upgrading a nightmare. There are 130 *.rej files in my data/TWiki directory, and I guess that in almost all of these cases I should simply use the Dakar version without looking. But what about the changes I've made on purpose? Maybe such considerations have led to the introduction of TWikiPreferences to store "local customisation".

In particular, what about things like NewUserTemplate (or any of the other *Template-Topics)? In the beginning I thought these were open to customisation. But then, when upgrading to Dakar, I found that my customisations didn't fit Dakar's needs - and that user home pages registered under Cairo are looking different from those who are registering under Dakar.

What am I as a TWiki administrator allowed to do per design? Is the UpgradeTwiki procedure supposed to take care for merging my customisation into new releases or should I record the diffs myself?

Or should I venture to suggest feature requests and patches so there can be one single NewUserTemplate or TWikiRegistration fitting all needs? Dakar's %IF makes a lot of things, if not all, possible....

Environment

-- HaraldJoerg - 14 Oct 2005

Answer

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The original design of TWiki never considered upgrading; that is something that has developed as time has gone on. We are trying to move all variable settings out of "read-only" places to simplify upgrade, hence the way Dakar introduces local site settings for most things. But there is still a lot of parameterisation missing, and will be for some time to come, I'm afraid (too much to do, too few hands)

-- CrawfordCurrie - 30 Nov 2005