                                                                                      = A List of 'Frequently Asked Questions' about the Web-Editing System
  
 'Thoughts, questions, comments?' [self-edit-link]

* What is this web system and what is it called?    

  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. 


* How do I edit a page

  Most pages should have a link which says something like
  'Edit this page' [self-edit-link]. 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' link:///refurb/webpad/control.php  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 [link://refurb/manage/admin.php].

* How do I rename a document?

  (feb 04) Sorry but you cant currently, unless you have 
  a password for the administration system. With a password, go to the 
  'admin' link:///refurb/manage/admin.php page and choose the 
  appropriate link from there.

* How do I choose the template to be used by the document

  The process is not ideal. Choose a document to edit by navigating 
  through the webpad 'control' link:///refurb/webpad/control.php 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' link:///refurb/webpad/html-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'

* Why did you write this system?

  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' http://www.zope.org 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
  [www.mission.com.au] 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'
  http://www.ella-associates.org using the strange choice of the bash
  shell scripting language and some cgi scripts. 

* What does the word markup mean?

  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
  [http://www.ella-associates.org/alexis-info/docs/the-ramble.html]

  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.

* Is this just another wiki system?

  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 [http://www.c2.com] 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 [http://www.oddmuse.org]. 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.


* What features are you thinking of adding to the Webpad system?
  
  a- Create configuration files to influence the appearance
     of the output html (partially done feb 04). 
   - Automatically generate style sheets for each document, if required.
   - allow copying of config options between documents
   - write output scripts for formats such as Unix Man, DocBook
     Tex Info, Latex, Groff, and so on ... This is because I have grandiose
     ideas about this system being a publishing system rather than
     just a way to create web-pages.
   - I would like to write an 'installer' script which would get all the 
     files required for the system from accross the internet and place them
     in the correct directories, as well as configuring the 'include' path
     which is at the top of each php script. This would also overcome many
     permissions problems with files and directories not being editable.
     See link:///refurb/manage/ for some incomplete install scripts
     such as install-zip-system.php
   - Automatically make text like warning:  be formatted in red or 
     in some other notable way (feb 2004, this should work). Also,
     make references to keys on the keyboard get transformed into 
     images of those keys. So you would type "press the enter key "
     and the word  enter would be transformed into an HTML image tag.
     I implemented this a little so if you type press the 
     enter key ,you should see a button.    


* When I edit documents I see strange codes at the bottom like [*faq*]. What does this mean?

  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.

* Why dont you just store all your documents in XML?    

  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" http://www.findesign.org actually did a 
  lot of work on this but he wrote it in java and based it on 'netbeans'
  http://www.netbeans.org 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" http://www.vim.org  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' 
  http://www.amazon.com like they do in a particularly interesting 'wiki'
  system called 'OddMuse' http://www.oddmuse.org ,the unix syste is
  powerful because each program does one thing and is linkable to 
  other programs which also do one thing. 

* Are you still working on this?
  
  Yes (feb 04) there are a number of things I would like to do to the 
  system such as 
    u- Make all capital lines into section headings
     - Allow the easy choosing of templates
     - Allow documents to be configured via a conf file, for such things
       as whether a table of contents should appear in the output
     - create docs in other formats 
     - ...


* What other documents are available?

  Look in the link:///refurb/docs  directory. Or look at the 
  link:///refurb/docs/documents.html document summary

* Why dont my hyperlinks work?

  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.

* How can I find out the tricks to use to format webpages?

  Look at the existing documents or see the document
  link:///refurb/docs/wiki-language.html
 
* What language is this system written in?
 
    As you can probably tell, it is written in PHP. 

* Do I need an SQL database to install this on my server?

    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..

* How do I install this system?

  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)

* What is a plain text file?

  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. 

* I dont have Microsoft Windows, can I still use this?

  Yes

* I use a text-only browser, can I use this system?

  Yes. I have used the 'Lynx' http://lynx.browser.org/ 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 link:///refurb/docs/features.html for more information.
  See http://www.vim.org for using text editors with lynx. 

* I use a screen reader and browser, can I use this system?
  
  I dont know, but it should be possible since it works with a 
  text only browser.

* What are some interesting tricks?

  u-
  The system makes things which look like file names format differently
  so /this/should/look/different.txt
  -
  The system does some dodgy HTML transforms like if you type
  -->> press the enter key --<< it should display as
  'press the enter key '. This feature would probably not work on an old
  Netscape browser, since every form element has to be in a form
  container in order to render, if I remember correctly
  -
  Put an exclamation mark in front of a URL target to make it open
  in a new window when you click on the link. Enclose a URL in square
  brackets to make it appear like a footnote like this [http://lynx.browser.org]
  -
  Use u-- (two hyphens) to start an un-ordered list in which no bullets
  symbols will appear in the HTML
  - 
  To make a link to edit the document which is the 'source' of a web-page
  you can use the special text [.self-edit-link] (no leading full stop)
  which will render as [self-edit-link] and which allows the reader to
  edit the document. Similar links may be automatically included in the
  template which is used for a document, so this link may not be necessar.

  

[*faq*]                                                                                                                                                                                                                        