[SGVLUG] Call for webmasters / upcoming presentations

[Dustin]

Ack!  Topquoting!  Icky!

On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, Don Saxton wrote:

> /A little tough love here --  if you really understood how easy it is, 
> you would have done it by now.

I'm here to tell you it ain't that way for every Wiki.  I mostly have
TWiki set up for our next test, since you guys are talking about Wikis
(hey, we aim to please here at "laurences.net Global Industries"), and it
has the worst installation procedure of any of the web packages I've
installed (but not the most boring, which would probably be Gallery)--and
that's WITHOUT needing to give it a MySQL account to play with like the
other packages.  You pretty much need root access too, to twiddle apache's
config files.  It's the only reason I'm still awake when I should be
asleep, getting ready for doing carpentry for most of the day tomorrow....

For starters, I had to explicitly disobey the directions to make it work.  
And that was a fairly easy problem.  By contrast Mambo was pretty easy,
though there was a documentation glitch or two there.  But that's not 
quite like the TWiki case, where I had to remove two apache directives 
that were explicitly given as necessary. :-(  The security configuration
is kinda whacky too, since it uses the standard Wiki mechanisms.

I don't think installation pain is an important criterion, since it's a
one-time-only job and if we/the web team can't figure out how to install 
pretty much any package we should go back to MS-Windows <big grin>, but 
since the subject came up....[A

The reason it's not up yet is that it doesn't do user authentication on
its own, at all, and I'm not that keen to set up something totally
wide-open on my machine, particularly since it may already have been
spidered.  It depends on apache for authentication, which means I have to
actually review the docs and see how to set that up.  Woo-hoo.

Don't get me wrong, I probably *should* know how to do this
already...maybe I should set it up with secure authentication for the
practice. :-/

I should maybe mention my working assumption for some feedback.  It's
great that a few of you have jumped in with both feet and played with
Mambo, but I'd hate for you to get so used to Mambo that everything else
is annoying because it doesn't work like Mambo.  So I thought it wouldn't
hurt to set up an alternative fairly early, and I think a Wiki will be
more different than, say, phpwebsite.  Does the web team like that idea,
or would you prefer to do one at a time and not move on until the last one
is thoroughly tested?

Dustin