[pmwiki-devel] One click installation process...

The Editor editor at fast.st
Mon Nov 27 05:31:03 CST 2006


Well, what a bit of discussion!  And I certainly want to defer to the
experience of all these excellent progrrammers.  After all, I just
have one *little* recipe (and 2 sites!)under my belt.  But then again,
as a non-programmer I can sympathize with others like me who might be
intimidated by the whole idea of editing php files directly...

This group would not include those who set up complex farm layouts, of
course--but rather those who use simple standard default installs.
Which simplifies things considerably.  Anyone doing something more is
already doing config file edits.  We're talking about the guy that
just took a look at PmWiki and said--too hard. Edit config files?  No
way. I'm outta here.  It's about perception.

Technically, I know it would not be hard to pull together a script
that scanned all the php files in your cookbook, when you browsed to a
specific page and then dynamically created a list of checkboxes for
each php file for enabling/disabling them when browsing to a certain
page. Plus a submit button that saved the info as a simple text file
in the wiki.d directory. Sitewide the same module could just read the
data page, and include all listed recipes.  Shoot, that is something I
could probably do myself.  Another ZAP module?  : )

If we wanted to make it a bit more complex we could do it like the
groupattributes pages, so you could also enable/disable recipes for
specific groups or even specific pages.  No different.  Personally I
prefer working through the wiki wherever possible, as it makes making
changes possible from any location, not just my home PC where I have
my editing software, ftp, etc.

Since you wouldn't be allowing any write access to any php folders,
what are the risks with this much at least?  Those who wanted a more
complex setup (farms, etc) would not be able to use the script (unless
you had a cookbookdir variable).  Recipes that required more
configuration would only be partially installed this way and might
require a config page like Dominique pointed out.  (Excellent
suggestions Dominique!). But for most recipes (specially marked) a
user could just download and enable via the wiki and never touch a
config file.

Is there any opposition to doing this much?

Cheers,
Caveman

PS. If I'm beating a dead horse I'll drop this.  I realize it might be
better in the long run to just urge them to get used to editing config
files from the start.  But still, I suspect if we can ease them into
using PmWiki, they'll get there eventually as soon as they want some
extra feature or markup. And it might look nice to have an
"auto-install" feature available for PmWiki when advertising it!



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