[pmwiki-users] PMWiki default documents vs search engines

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Wed Dec 13 21:08:08 CST 2006


On Thu, Dec 14, 2006 at 12:09:52AM +0000, Lucian Wischik wrote:
> porneL <mailinglist <at> pornel.net> writes:
> > When I search for information about PMWiki I rarely find PMWiki's own site  
> > and documentation. The problem is that every PMWiki installation contains  
> > full copy of documentation
> 
> Is it even useful to copy the documentation onto every site that uses pmwiki?
> I'd much rather have my site just link to www.pmwiki.org.

"Why PmWiki includes a copy of the documentation"

One of my first experiences with wiki software packages was that
I would download and install them, but there was virtually no
documentation included with the package.  Since the purpose of
a wiki is to allow collaboration among multiple authors, it
totally surprised me that the packages didn't provide at least
minimal documentation for authors to learn how to use the wiki.
In fact, the other packages didn't even provide standard documentation
that could be installed as an optional component.  So, I was left
with three somewhat unsatisfactory options:
   1. referring my authors to an external site (not good, as
      the other site often contains more than just documentation
      and/or things irrelevant to the wiki I'm running),
   2. copying instructions from the other site into my wiki
      (with no indication of license to do so, plus the hassle
      of continually trying to decide when pages needed to be
      copied), or
   3. creating and maintaining my own set of documentation pages
      for every wiki I installed.

So, when I created PmWiki, I didn't want to impose the same hardship
on future PmWiki administrators that the other wiki engines had 
imposed on me.  Thus, PmWiki has always come pre-installed with
basic documentation, and it's easy for sites to customize
the documentation without losing the customizations across
upgrades.

For those sites that don't want to expose the documentation, there
are at least two good options:
   1. Put a read password of "@lock" on PmWiki.GroupAttributes --
      this will generally keep the pages from being found or
      appearing in pagelists.
   2. After installing/upgrading, simply remove the PmWiki.* files
      from wikilib.d/ .

It used to be that option #2 wasn't viable because some utility
pages (e.g., PmWiki.EditQuickReference) were held in the PmWiki 
group, but now all such pages are in the Site group so it's no
longer a big issue.

Yes, I recognize that continually removing the PmWiki.* pages
from wikilib.d/ on each upgrade can be a bit of a pain, but
at the moment I think it's the least of the available evils.

But I'm open to suggestions, and if a lot of people think that we'd
be better off packaging the documentation as a separate download
or in a different manner than it is now, we can explore that
a bit.

Pm




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