[Pmwiki-users] Working with files -- Experience using PmWiki

[chr@home.se]

Note: This is a big topic, but important. Experience from other people 
using PmWiki or other systems should be heard here as well.

In my experience PmWiki is not really useful for working with files, it's
to tedious and error prone when you use the upload pages. One problem is
that you can only do this one file at a time. Another problem is that you
have to be careful when you name the uploaded file, since this is the name
that you will use when you later on refer to it in wiki pages.

The solution I eventually ended up using is different for different kinds
of documents. In general however, I ended up placing the documents in a
separate directory on the web server.  Most of these files are version
controlled under CVS, so this documents directory mainly contains files
that have been checked out using CVS on the server.

Then I created an intra-link to this directory, say [@Doc:@], so a link to
a document might be:

	 Doc:dir1/dir2/someFile.pdf

A drawback with this method is that I'm not sure if I've entered a
document link correctly, e.g. if I've made a spelling error. It would be
nice if intra-links could be flagged (in localmap.txt) so that they
automatically check if the target exists, and if it doesn't it prints a
'?' (like Attach:)

As for files such as copies of reference articles that never change, and
their number just grow, I simply scp:ed them to a directory on the server.

There is a very small number of files that I've actually uploaded using
PmWiki, mostly because it felt like to much work to use CVS for them. A
typical file where I do this would be when I create an illustration that
only is used by a wiki page. However, even for these illustrations I'm
starting to use CVS, since it allows me to check out the source of the
image to my local account, modify the source, export it as .png and commit
both the source and the image to the repository. Then I finally check out
the updated files on the server, so that the wiki page shows the nev
version of the image.

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr