[pmwiki-users] Questions from a first PM Wiki user

[Jaap Suter]

Hi everybody.

This is my first post to the list. I just installed PM Wiki on
http://www.basewiki.com, a moderated restricted wiki dedicated to BASE jumping
information. It's more a glorified easy to use content-management system than a
public wiki, but nonetheless it works great. It's not public or operational yet,
but over the next few weeks the look and feel will be tuned, content will be
added and we'll go live.

First of, I must say I'm very happy with PM Wiki so far. I did some research
into several different wikis. Initially I looked into MoinMoin, but I couldn't
find an easy way to allow comment boxes at the bottom of each page. Then I tried
TWiki and actually installed on my hosting server for a day. It turned out to be
way too complicated, too powerful, and totally over engineered. I deleted it
again, and next up was PMWiki whose lightweightedness and philosophy appealed to me.

I'm a C++ programmer during the day, and I'm totally clueless when it comes to
PHP, Perl, Apache and all that jazz, but I must say that installation of PM Wiki
was totally flawless.

So far, I've been very happy with it and it seems I'll stick with PM Wiki. I
have a few questions though. I've done some searching through the mailing
archives to find answers but the signal to noise ratio in my search results was
rather high. I've also looked through the documentation to find some answers but
the ones below remained. I hope I'm not asking the obvious. If so, I apologize.

1. It is made very clear how to do group specific headers and footers, but to do
site wide global headers and footers is hidden away in a cookbook item
(http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/AllGroupHeader). Why is this?

I was actually going to ask where it was, but then this morning I found it. I
have yet to try it. I want to add a comment box to the bottom of every page.
Right now I just created a group footer for every group on my site, but they all
contain the same thing which is obviously not a very efficient way of working.
I'll try the sitewide cookbook solution tonight.

2. Where do I set the default page that is loaded on startup? It seems to be
Main.HomePage but I like to rename it to something else (mostly because I don't
like the big "Home Page" title on my frontpage.

3. I changed my config.php to include a site-wide password to edit pages (which
I intend to only distribute to a select group of content-suppliers and editors).
This works for most pages. However, my site-bar on the left had a edit-sitebar
link, and that was still accessible and editable without a password. Was this a
bug? The solution was to change the attributes of the Site.SiteBar to require a
password for editing. Why are all the other pages protected by default, but the
Site.SiteBar page not? Is this a bug or a feature?

4. I want to change the look of the website, but the available skins and the
available themes in FixFlow are not sufficient. Do I just copy paste an existing
FixFlow .css file, rename it to something else, make my changes in there, then
update the fixflow php file to refer to that one by default?

5. The FixFlow rightbar works great for me on both IE and FireFox, both on XP.
However, my friend was running the site on FireFox on XP as well (might be a
different FireFox version though) and he had bullets next to each item in the
RightBar (even though I don't see those bullets). The bullets themselves aren't
necessarily a problem, except that the bullets are drawn outside of the sidebar,
left of it. I can send a screenshot if you're interested.

6. What is the best way to make moderation options available? I made a
moderators webpage (http://www.basewiki.com/wiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Moderators)
that includes links to the things that people will want to edit, but has to be
hidden for the average reader. Is this the recommended way? Or do most of you
expert PM Wiki users know the names of those pages and do you just type it in
the address bar?

Anyway, that's it for now. I will probably have more questions later on. 

Pm Wiki is a great piece of software. It lives up to its philosophy and it's
another great example that open-source can be great!

Thanks,

Jaap