00394: Turn Intermap files into wiki pages
Description: I'd like to suggest turning the intermap files into normal wiki pages.
It seems to me that they could be handled just like the XLPages with the advantage of easier handling and no disadvantage at all.
(To block spamming via the intermap pages, they could protected by a password in the standard way.)
Minor issue, but matches PmWikiPhilosophy:
5. Be easy to install, configure, and maintain
--Henning March 17, 2005, at 04:45 AM
Comments/Suggestions:
- I like the idea but then under what group or pagename would this page be?
- I could suggest Group "Admin" and Page "Intermap". Hopefully this introduces a new beginning for admin group where other similar admin related pages could be placed, then the group password protected. And of course this would be a new area to explore for skin designers. :-)) ~ V.Krishn
On my own wiki, I have created an admin group, password protected, which contains many informations and access to specific administration cookbook recipes, and a future intermap page may go there.
Anyway, it can also be interesting to have such page public, but password protected with the same pass as URLapprove. PRZ
Thinking about it, I believe we could generalize:
- All configuration files should be editable through the Wiki so that the Wiki becomes the only tool needed to maintain the Wiki (after the initial installation).
Or am I going too far here because I missed something?
--Henning April 01, 2005, at 08:26 AM
Well, PmWiki's configuration files are PHP scripts, and admins can (and do) use many PHP features inside of configuration scripts beyond just setting variables. Combine this with a statement like "All configuration files should be editable through the wiki", and you get "the wiki is used to edit .php configuration files". That idea scares the heck out of the system administrator in me.
Beyond that, in order for the wiki to be able to edit any configuration files, those files must also be writable by the webserver. Therefore, even if we could make an interface smart enough to "filter out" malicious configuration requests, someone on the same server could generally just use another script on the server to perform malicious changes to the configuration files.
So, at best we can only provide a subset of configuration options via the wiki, and some items would need to be left to .php scripts on the server. In general I've taken the position that it's better to have just one primary configuration mechanism (the .php scripts) rather than have two and try to figure out how/where they interact.
All of that said, we can still potentially use wiki pages as a mechanism to define InterMap entries. There are a number of reasons why I haven't taken this to be the default; the biggest is that I don't like the idea of adding lots of "locked" pages into the distribution or predefining too many groups/pages at installation. There are quite a few that believe that PmWiki's existing set of default pages and groups already go a bit too far, so adding Main.InterMap or (worse) Admin.InterMap is probably crossing a line that is better left uncrossed.
My feeling at this point is to have this feature as a cookbook recipe, or as something that an admin can easily enable via a switch in config.php.
--Pm
>That idea scares the heck out of the system administrator in me.
Oops - I was afraid I'd miss something important! :-)
I can see your point about consistency in the philosopy ... it would be easy to confuse someone like me by relying on competing configuration principles.
--Henning April 04, 2005, at 10:36 AM