[pmwiki-announce] Keeping recipes up to date

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Wed Feb 14 22:44:01 CST 2007


Over time many people have asked for a way to keep track of
when new versions of recipes become available on pmwiki.org .

I'm pleased to announce that I've put together a prototype
of this capability -- now available from

    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/SiteAnalyzer
    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/RecipeUpdates

Both of these pages do the same thing (identify new versions
of available recipes), but differ slightly in the approach used.

The Cookbook.RecipeUpdates is a traditional cookbook recipe 
approach; the admin installs a recipeupdates.php script that 
provides a custom ?action=recipeupdates.  This action
fetches the latest recipe list from pmwiki.org and displays
a table comparing installed recipe versions against the
pmwiki.org ones.

However, the recipeupdates.php script requires that PHP be configured
to allow url fopens, and many web hosting providers have this
capability turned off as a security precaution.

So, another method is to use the PmWiki.SiteAnalyzer page.
The PmWiki site analyzer will fetch information from a PmWiki
site (including any installed recipes) and then report on
any newer versions of recipes that may be available.

This is a new and somewhat experimental feature, so there
may be a few quirks that need to be worked out yet.  Also,
some recipes (especially older ones) haven't provided
the information needed to report version differences.
But hopefully this will be a start in the right direction.

Comments, questions, and suggestions welcomed as always.
Thanks!

Pm



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