[pmwiki-users] Pre-announcing 2.2.0 non-beta release, new release manager

[Peter Bowers]

> > one thing is probably very important: have some way to install major
> > cookbooks from a drop down list or checkbox
> 
> This isn't likely to happen (the drop-down list or checkbox part),
> because we don't want the webserver to have write permission to
> the cookbook/ directory.

I *think* the reason different people have a different opinion on this topic
(perhaps?) is because we may be talking about different things.  Obviously
from PM's post he is thinking of something where an administrator pushes a
button or something and the recipe is downloaded and installed and
configured.  

I think the origin of the "automatically installed cookbooks" idea was much
more similar to what you find in scripts/authuser.php.  This is a "recipe"
in a sense but it was approved as something that gets installed in the
scripts/ directory instead of the cookbook/ directory but only gets turned
on by an intentional editing of the config.php file.  My understanding of
the "some way to install major cookbooks" idea is that these recipes would
be installed by default when you unzipped pmwiki.zip (or whatever).  Then
the difference between activating a script by editing config.php and
activating it by editing a wiki page (or checking a box on a form in an
admin page which simply updates PTVs on that page, for instance) is trivial.


I already put together a PageConfig recipe (which I still use but have come
to dislike in terms of the syntax I chose) which would be an effective
"proof of concept" that page-based administration can be done and can be
done securely.  By securely I mean that only a list of approved scripts can
be included and only a list of approved variables can be set to (optionally)
an approved set of values.  (I'm not recommending PageConfig for "core" --
just mentioning it as a proof of concept.)

Anyway, my point in this is just to point out that we already do this with
pmwiki with authuser.php -- it's just a question of expanding the set of
recipes that are included and figuring out QA procedures and etc.

-Peter