Installing TWiki

Abstract

Currently, TWiki is without doubt the flagship of the free wiki variants. It not only offers sophisticated permissions and user administration, various separate areas and its own forms, but also a plugin interface with which the system can be expanded by versatile additional functions, such as drawing, calculation or a database. In contrast to MediaWiki, TWiki is written in the script language Perl. It does not use a database to store pages, but rather saves them as files in a directory structure directly on the hard drive. When doing so, it often refers to commands and programs that are present by default on Linux systems. While not impossible, this makes the setup in a test environment under Windows more difficult. For history administration, the tool RCS (Revision Control System) is employed, which records modifications and stores the files accordingly. Since this tool is not present or cannot be installed (in the case of web hosts) on all systems, TWiki has its own version of RCS which, however, is not as high-performance as the original. All required components are listed in Tab. 11.1.