[pmwiki-users] Questions from a first PM Wiki user

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Fri Sep 23 11:35:17 CDT 2005


On Thu, Sep 22, 2005 at 10:47:27AM -0700, Jaap Suter wrote:
> Hi everybody.
> 
> This is my first post to the list. I just installed PM Wiki on
> http://www.basewiki.com, a moderated restricted wiki dedicated to BASE jumping
> information. It's more a glorified easy to use content-management system than a
> public wiki, but nonetheless it works great. It's not public or operational yet,
> but over the next few weeks the look and feel will be tuned, content will be
> added and we'll go live.
> 
> First of, I must say I'm very happy with PM Wiki so far. I did some research
> into several different wikis. Initially I looked into MoinMoin, but I couldn't
> find an easy way to allow comment boxes at the bottom of each page. Then I tried
> TWiki and actually installed on my hosting server for a day. It turned out to be
> way too complicated, too powerful, and totally over engineered. I deleted it
> again, and next up was PMWiki whose lightweightedness and philosophy appealed to me.
> 
> I'm a C++ programmer during the day, and I'm totally clueless when it comes to
> PHP, Perl, Apache and all that jazz, but I must say that installation of PM Wiki
> was totally flawless.
> 
> So far, I've been very happy with it and it seems I'll stick with PM Wiki. I
> have a few questions though. I've done some searching through the mailing
> archives to find answers but the signal to noise ratio in my search results was
> rather high. I've also looked through the documentation to find some answers but
> the ones below remained. I hope I'm not asking the obvious. If so, I apologize.
> 
> 1. It is made very clear how to do group specific headers and footers, 
> but to do site wide global headers and footers is hidden away in a 
> cookbook item (http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/AllGroupHeader). 
> Why is this?

Well, as far as I know site-wide headers and footers isn't all that
common.  But more to the point, PmWiki is *extremely* flexible in
terms of the ways it can be configured; if we were to build every
configuration possibility into the core then we'd end up with 
something that is really bloated.  Or, as you said regarding TWiki...

    "Then I tried TWiki ... It turned out to be way too complicated, 
    too powerful, and totally over engineered."

The size of the Cookbook is an indication of all of the different
ways in which PmWiki can be used; if we try to do them all in the
base distribution directly then things can get a little too complex.

> 3. I changed my config.php to include a site-wide password to edit 
> pages (which I intend to only distribute to a select group of 
> content-suppliers and editors).  This works for most pages. However, 
> my site-bar on the left had a edit-sitebar link, and that was still 
> accessible and editable without a password. ...  Is this a bug or a feature?

It's a (often requested) feature.  Normally pages in the Site group 
are protected against editing by default, but by popular demand
there's a special setting on Site.SideBar that allows it to be edited  
without a password ("nopass").  Perhaps we should instead say that
Site.SideBar inherits the site-wide password; I'll have to see if there's
a way to implement that.  At any rate, you found the correct solution
for now, which is to simply set a password on Site.SideBar.

Pm




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