Mar
29
2005

Twiki pain

In the bid to up the customer communication stakes, I spent my bank holiday customising my first installation of Twiki – http://www.twiki.org – the rather good wiki package. I’ve been using Wiki’s for a good number of years now – mainly of the Zope variety, hooked up to a bug tracker. Projects without a wiki – are well outside my comfort zone.

Having installed twiki – I can now understand why we’re still awaiting the mass uptake of this tool for collaboration.

My gripes:

  • It took much time to get all the pages on the wiki password restricted. The help pages are littered with speak about ‘wiki’s are about open communication’ – well yes – but this is an internal wiki in a hosted environment – I need to issue login details
  • I had to install a patch to the core twiki system to enable sessions. Everytime I clicked on a page, I needed to re-key my username and password. The patch fixed it – but why doesn’t the system come with sessions by default – maybe I’m spoilt by Zope?
  • Sessions had to be tweaked to stop them locking against a single IP address. I understand the security implications of locking a session to an IP – but AOL users bounce between proxies like a pinball machine – and just as we do with phpBB – we switched that off.
  • I also replaced the jump to page box with a global wiki search box. Newbie wiki users will want to search – the way that twiki divides the wikis into seperate ‘webs’ is a bit of a pain

    • apart from that – Twiki is really cool. I’ve installed the java based drawing tool – so I can sketch out basic ideas on a web browser and collaborate on drawings….. how cool is that. I’ve yet to play with the action organisor and the calendar. The spreadsheet and table functions look useful too. As a basic wiki – it really works – I think the toys will make it a run away success…. once I’ve got people logged on and passwords generated at the command line with htpasswd :-(

    Written by Guy in: Cosmic |

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