I just set up Instiki last night, and so far everything is working pretty well. I''m frustrated by the lack of administration controls, however, in particular the lack of page renaming. I''m also currently trying to figure out how to resolve a situation in which I need to remove authors, or more specifically revisions from certain authors. I have tried going into the command_log and editing out a series of revision to remove the references to that particular author, but I get "dump format error(0x74)" on restart when doing that. I have also looked into the export/import patches discussed on instiki.org, but it doesn''t seem like any of these work with the current version. Is there a way to export all of the data, modify certain bits, and then import it all back into Instiki again, ideally retaining revisions? Are there working patches that I haven''t found?
Tyler As I understand it, Instiki does not have any real concept of authors or a user database. ''Authors'' just consist of a page and a cookie tracks your ''author page'' to put it in the little text field at bottom after you edit the first page during a session. For secured sites, a password allows you to have binary access control, but has nothing to do with authorship. I think if you just get forget the concept of an author beyond a linked page, it will help. Also, regarding page renaming, you can just: 1. Create another link next to the old link name on the existing page that references it. 2. Edit the page you want to rename, copy the content from text field, and cancel the editing. 3. Go to the existing page the references it, edit it, and change the name for the page there. 4. Click on the new page name question mark on this existing page to create the new page and copy the content into the text field You might also want to go in and remove all the content of the old page, or replace its contents with ''DELETE'' so it does not interfere with search results. A facility exists to delete all orphaned pages that do have links from any of the existing pages connected to the HomePage ''origin'', so this page will get cleared up eventually if nothing else links to it. I agree it would be nice to have a way to rename without going through these steps, but it adds a lot of overhead, especially considering that you have n possible pages with links to the page that would either: 1. Need to have their content programmatically modified to point to the new link 2. Have links to a page with no content since the content moved with the rename I would rather not have the content prone to automated search and replace in this fashion as it means a rename of a page has the *potential* to corrupt all the pages that link to it by a bad search and replace. Also, to what author to you ascribe the change on all these linking pages? What if others are currently editing some of those pages? You can see the complications become legion. Basically, Instiki is simpler than it seems, but in some ways, that''s the beauty and power of it. It actually needs to get *simpler* then it is now. The alternative is Twiki, which has tons of administration controls, but is basically unusable because of them. If you stop and think, do I really *need* X feature or administrative control you will find, in most cases, you do not. Sorry for the long message, but I felt the same way you did when I first started using it, but over time, became more and more comfortable. Tam?s On May 11, 2005, at 3:46 PM, Tyler Hunt wrote: I just set up Instiki last night, and so far everything is working pretty well. I''m frustrated by the lack of administration controls, however, in particular the lack of page renaming. I''m also currently trying to figure out how to resolve a situation in which I need to remove authors, or more specifically revisions from certain authors. I have tried going into the command_log and editing out a series of revision to remove the references to that particular author, but I get "dump format error(0x74)" on restart when doing that. I have also looked into the export/import patches discussed on instiki.org, but it doesn''t seem like any of these work with the current version. Is there a way to export all of the data, modify certain bits, and then import it all back into Instiki again, ideally retaining revisions? Are there working patches that I haven''t found? _______________________________________________ Instiki-users mailing list Instiki-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/instiki-users
Hi Tyler, On 5/12/05, Tyler Hunt <tyler@tylerhunt.com> wrote:> I just set up Instiki last night, and so far everything is working > pretty well. I''m frustrated by the lack of administration controls, > however, in particular the lack of page renaming.In Instiki you have to follow the steps Tom?s mentioned to rename pages, specifically the delete orphaned pages. (I didn''t like it either so I forked Instiki).> I''m also currently trying to figure out how to resolve a situation in > which I need to remove authors, or more specifically revisions from > certain authors. I have tried going into the command_log and editing > out a series of revision to remove the references to that particular > author, but I get "dump format error(0x74)" on restart when doing > that. I have also looked into the export/import patches discussed on > instiki.org, but it doesn''t seem like any of these work with the > current version. Is there a way to export all of the data, modify > certain bits, and then import it all back into Instiki again, ideally > retaining revisions? Are there working patches that I haven''t found?Do you mean delete discreet revisions of pages? You can always rollback to a particular revision of a page. Do you mean delete all revisions by a certain author across all pages? There is no way to currently do that. As you''ve discovered, editing the binary madeleine dump files is not a good idea :-). As for export/import: the functionality is there - but disabled - in Instiki 0.10.1 as it''s not production ready. Someone (Ryan I think) posted a couple of days ago that he did make it work with minimal changes. Ryan, perhaps you can post a patch? Alexey, I know it''ll break things, but it''s easy to make madeleine use YAML as the dump file format (zipped up). I make a patch on Instiki core to enable this as a command line option. This will of course mean that you cannot interchange snapshots files between the two formats (unless I come up with an auto-detection way), but given enough upfront warnings some people may choose to always use this format. ps. As Tom?s pointed out re user security, explicit simplicity and lack of security is actually better than attempted incomplete security. Do you have a particular need that you''re trying to solve? Reading between the lines it sounds like you have a public wiki that has been spammed. To my understanding, there is no way to combat this effectively on public wikis, except making then password protected (i.e. only if you''re one of a privileged few who know the edit password, you can only read). This is a global issue with wikis and blog, not just for Instiki. I actually prefer the Instiki way - by not attempting to solve it (which you can''t) you significantly decrease the application complexity. HTH, Assaph