Re: [sfWiki-devel] (no subject)

[Iain S. <iai...@ya...>]

At 01:30 PM 5/25/2001 -0500, Kye wrote:

>Ideally, I would like all the participants to be able to read and write to 
>any page at any time.  But I would not want non-participants to be able to 
>change the pages, though it would be fine for others to be able to read 
>them.  Does this make sense?
>
>Does it seem to you that sfWiki would do what I need?  And if so, how 
>would I go about using it?  Ideally, I would like for someone to be able 
>to go to our website and from there, be able to get to a sort of a map of 
>conference-related change-able pages.  Is anything like this possible, for 
>someone who doesn't have extensive development experience, or much in the 
>way of a budget?

Sounds like sfWiki would work well for you.  And sfWiki is free so I think 
it will fit in your budget!

>I am woefully ignorant about the simplest of things:  what does it mean 
>for something to be installed at SourceForge?  what sort of server would 
>be similar?  what is a MySQL database?  Is that something that I would 
>need to have on my own computer, or would it need to be on the server that 
>hosts our website?  what is CVS?

Sourceforge is a particular hosting service for open source development 
projects.  It sounds like you need to install this on your own 
host/webserver (where you are already hosting your web pages).  Most web 
hosts will have mysql or something similar already installed, and php which 
is required for sfWiki.  If this is the case, all you need to do is 
download and install the sfWiki php scripts as per installation instructions.

>Is it possible for someone of my limited experience to use sfWiki, or is 
>there something else you know about that would be more appropriate for me?

The only problem is going to be in setting things up.  You must be at least 
minimally comfortable getting web server services hosted and installed 
(you'll need to create database tables and install php scipts).  This 
should be trivial for a "webmaster" or any friends you may have that are 
relatively savvy in web hosting.  You may also be able to ask your web 
hosting service to install sfWiki for you.  Finally, you can ask for help 
on this list.  However, I don't know how willing most on this list will be 
in helping with the many minutia needed to complete the process.

As a last option, you can ask someone on this list (I highly suggest the 
author, Todd Miller) to help, perhaps for a small consulting fee.

In any case, once you have it installed, sfWiki is remarkably maintenance 
free from a software standpoint.  You manage the website's content through 
a web browser and usually don't need to muck around with your web server or 
software at all.

-iain


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