[pmwiki-users] Update pmwiki using perl scripts ...

[Joachim Durchholz]

Ginil Gharat schrieb:
>  
> Pmwiki, I suppose is written in php, so is it possible to update using perl
> scripts ?

Sure. PHP or shell script would do as well.

 > I was trying to use WWW-Mechanize-1.18 but was *not* very
> successful with my attempts.

I'm not sure what WWW-Mechanize does. It would help to hear what exactly 
the problems were.

Anyway, here's how I'd approach that:

1) Get the previous contents of the page via wget or curl, with an URL 
of http://server/path/pmwiki.php?n=Group.Page&action=source. The 
relevant part here is the action=source bit, it will return the page's 
wikitext as text/plain.
2) Modify the page (presumably by appending or prepending the new log 
entries).
3) Write the result back using a POST request. (This might involve going 
through a login dialog, or whatever authentication is installed on your 
wiki.)

There's a danger here: You can't lock PmWiki pages against concurrent 
access. To be really complete, the script would have to react to an 
error message in a useful way (possibly by regetting the updated page 
contents and trying again; or by saving the page including the conflict 
markers and sending a mail to the administrator to clean up the mess 
manually).


An alternative approach would be a recipe that implements a new action, 
say ?action=update. Take a look at the Cookbook recipes, several of them 
implement new actions. The advantage is that you can work "from the 
inside" and don't have to worry about authorizing the access (but you'd 
have to worry about adding authorization to the new action).

Or you could call PmWiki from the command line. Write a shell script 
that unsets any of the usual CGI variables (say, REQUEST_URI), write a 
code snippet in config.php that checks whether $_ENV ['REQUEST_URI'] is 
set, and if it isn't, assume it's called from the command line and do 
your updates.

Whichever of the two methods you chose, after that your code is inside 
PmWiki and can access all the methods to update the page store.

Regards,
Jo