readme.txt

Meta:: Valid for: Silva 2.0+, Silva Wiki Toolbar 2.0+ Author: Andy Altepeter Email: aaltepet at altepeter dot net

Silva Wiki Toolbar

Expectations of this product

The term Wiki is used loosely. This product is meant as a means to hook "wiki-like" functionality into Silva. It turns Silva into a "Wiki" by exposing certain document information and tools to the public view of a silva site in the form of a toolbar.

This wiki toolbar has multiple "panels": 1. The edit panel provide a login or request access, or edit link. 2. The creator panel displays who created the document and when 3. The print article panel displays a quick print link 4. The revision panel displays current version information and provides links to navigate the revision history 5. The siblings panel shows siblings of the current document 6. The search panel allows (content) searches starting at the wiki root or within the current container.

This toolbar is an attempt at providing and promoting the "online collaboration" spirit of wiki using Silva as the content management system. Since Silva is used as the cms, users are able to take full advantage of Silva's advanced features.

Silva, being built on top of Zope, has very fine grained role-based access control. Access to SilvaWiki content (e.g. SilvaDocument, SilvaPublictaion, SilvaFoder, or any other silva object) is filtered through the builting access control machinery. This includes the siblings and revision panels, AutoTOCs, and searches. If you don't have access to view object x, it won't show up. If you don't have access to the SMI, you will not see the revision panel.

To achieve this goal, a couple changes needed to be made to Silva:

TOC Filter

AutoTOCs have a pluggable filter api. Filters remove items users shouldn't see. The "stock" filter removes items which have the hide_from_tocs silva-extra metadata field set. This isn't sufficient enough because objects a user may not have access to view will still be listed. Users will still know data is there, though they won't be able to view it.

With SilvaWikiToolbar installed, an additional TOC Filter is added which removes items a user doesn't have access to view.

Silva Find:

As of Silva 2.0, the toolbar uses SilvaFind to search the wiki. It assumes the name of the SilvaFind object is search. Add a SilvaFind object to the wiki root, called search, and set it's path to search within the wiki only.

If you won't want the SilvaFind object to be present in any TOC's, I suggest setting it's hide from tocs metadata property.

Index Documents

There are a few types of index objects that can be used in Silva. SilvaDocuments are perhaps the most common, Silva AutoTOCs are probably next in the list. In a SilvaWiki, it is probably a good idea to use AutoTOCs as the index items, so users can more easily see and navigate to content within the wiki.

Document Descriptions

The Silva Auto TOC and SilvaFind can display the silva-extra content-description (a.k.a description) next to each item. This is perhaps a more controllable way to display summary info than other options this author has seen, like rendering the first top-level element in the document. The latter isn't very useful when the document has a twenty item list as it's first element.

Install instructions are located in install.txt