Thoughts, questions, comments?
This system is a way of editing web-pages without using HTML and yet having freedom about what the content of the site is. It is essentially a type of wiki.
I am having trouble thinking of a name for this system, but I have been calling it 'webpad' or 'web notepad'. I am not inspired at the moment to think of a name.
Most pages should have a link which says something like Edit this page. You can just click on that link and type normally using your web-browser. No additional software or knowledge is required.
Some pages may be edited by anybody and others require a password in order to edit them. Also some functions require a password (such as copying a file)
You can access other functions using the control page This page allows you to find a file to edit. Not all files on the server are editable using the 'webpad' system. At least I certainly hope not. There is another system which does allow you to edit all the files but you will need a password in order to use it [*].
(feb 04) Sorry but you cant currently, unless you have a password for the administration system. With a password, go to the admin page and choose the appropriate link from there.
The process is not ideal. Choose a document to edit by navigating through the webpad control page. When you are editing the page, click on the link which says 'configure this document'. Choose the template you want to use for the templates directory using the drop-down list and click the 'update settings' button.
Now you still have to regenerate the document in order to actually see the changes. You do this by saving it once through the Webpad editor. Click on the 'edit document' link and then immediately click on 'save file'. Now view the document. It should be using the new template
Note: a file called 'filename.conf' dictates what template is used. This file is in the same folder as the document and has the same name except with an file name extension of 'conf'
I was working in an enviroment in which I couldnt ftp to the webserver which I was working on and for that reason I needed a way to create web-sites through a web-browser interface. If you have had a look at the zope you will notice that it contains a system to do that. But I wanted something simpler for the average web-visitor to use.
I was trying to create a web-site for the Mission Australia [*] community work center, and I got a very severe attack of overkill. Larry Wall, the original author of the perl language, has said that this is one of the standard programmers' curses.
I had already created a similar system for Ella Associates using the strange choice of the bash shell scripting language and some cgi scripts.
It is a way of adding information to a text file in order to indicate either the semantic content of that file or the way in which that file is to be displayed or processed by some output device (such as a printer). The current system uses a very simple 'wiki' style markup. I have attempted to answer this question before [*]
The present system tries to avoid forcing the user to know any kind of markup. The system essentially guesses at how the editor of the document would like the document to be formatted when it is transformed into a web-page.
If you have had a look at the wiki systems available you will notice that there is a huge number, and it would seem odd to write another one. Fair enough. (please see Ward Cunninghams [*] site for a good definition of what a wiki is.
I dont really think that this system is a wiki system, even though many of its features were inspired by wikis, especially the Oddmuse wiki [*]. This system seeks to promote the creation of documents which have some kind of structure, while at the same time, allowing the user to have a great deal of freedom in the content and the manner of creation of the documents. In that respect, it is more structured than a Wiki but less structured than an XML system.
This indicates to the transformation engine what sort of document the current document is. For example if you are writing a list of Frequently Asked Questions, such as the present document then you should put the code [*faq*] on a line by itself preferable at the end of the text. If you are writing a journal type of document, which contains entries for particular days, then you should put the code [*journal *] on a line by itself in the document.
Possibly this will be configurable through a settings page in the future but at the moment you need to use these codes.
This is another very good question. The answer is partly ideological and partly practical. For example, I dont have a decent XML editor to use, even though I was supposedly attempting to write one for the last year (2003) in Barcelona, but Barcelona was far too interesting a place to be writing XML editors in, so I didnt do much. The guy who has the company findesign actually did a lot of work on this but he wrote it in java and based it on netbeans and in my opinion it was far too slow to be of any use.
The other thing is that I dont really like XML editors. I prefer to just type, preferably in an HTML textarea or in some obscure editor such as vim So, this present system is going to try to be very xml friendly but it is not going to use xml as the central data format. As Kernighan pointed out in a very old book on the Unix operating system (sorry no IBN, and by the way IBNs in the current system dont create automatic links to amazon like they do in a particularly interesting 'wiki' system called OddMuse ,the unix syste is powerful because each program does one thing and is linkable to other programs which also do one thing.
Yes (feb 04) there are a number of things I would like to do to the system such as
Look in the /refurb/docs directory. Or look at the /refurb/docs/documents.html document summary
I have made a hyperlink in a document according to your info, but when I click on the link it says that the page cannot be found why?
Check that you have not put a full stop or a comma directly after the URL without any space. This is a common problem since a dot or comma is a legal character in a URL, there is no real way for the transformation engine to know that your full stop is not part of the URL.
Look at the existing documents or see the document /refurb/docs/wiki-language.html
As you can probably tell, it is written in PHP.
No, although it would be good to expand the system to allow it to use one. At the moment it uses what could be called a 'filesystem database', in other words such a bunch of text and html files..
There are some install scripts which are not finished. Have a look in the /manage/ directory for scripts with the word install in them. Basically you have to zip up the whole system using the backup folder function on the admin.php page. Then transport the zip file to the target server. Then unzip it, and then change references to the global variable file in EVERY script. So the short answer is that here is no simple way to install the system at the moment (feb 04)
Good question. You may have noticed, if you have been trawling through the various files which I have written, that I keep refering to this piece of terminology which does not seem particularly valued in any other part of the non-unix world. I mean a file which is encoded in one of the ISO standard character sets, such as ISO 8859-1 or perhaps a unicode standard like utf and which, in addition to this important characteristic, also contains no internal 'markup' structure, such as HTML or XML. Many people would call XML and HTML plain text files, but I dont.
Yes
Yes. I have used the Lynx browser with this system and found it to work well. But you need to set up Lynx to use an external text editor so that you dont have to use the Lynx 'text-areas' which are very difficult to edit text in. Press 'o' when in lynx, and set your editor to something you like (vim is recommended). When the cursor is in text-area in a web-page within Lynx, press control-D, and it should allow to edit the text in the text-area using the editor which you have selected. There is a configuration file option which you may have to set See /refurb/docs/features.html for more information. See http://www.vim.org for using text editors with lynx.
I dont know, but it should be possible since it works with a text only browser.
press the enter keyit should display as 'press