Thanks to a very kind wiki spammer, the Birmingham OpenGuide was trashed last night. Thankfully I did a backup yesterday afternoon, so was able to restore the site this morning. It was a painful restore though, as not being too familiar with postgresql, I ended up initially spend 2 hours last night until just before 2am trying to get the site back. Time when I should have been in bed fast asleep.
It's made me realise some of the flaws in the OpenGuides framework, all of which have been mentioned on the OG-DEV list, so I'm not the only one. The biggest pain is installation and configuration. The unhelpful response has been use Debian or rent a UML machine. It sets the barrier to entry much higher than it should be.
The most painful for me last night was the configuration for admin tasks. Deleting a page is fine, but what about rolling back a spammed node? It all has to be done manually. What about blocking IPs or preventing anonymous editing of pages? It looks I'm going to have to roll my own.
JJ suggested it would be nice if the coords where entered, that the map should open up in Google Maps. A great idea and I see there is even a patch from someone. Unfortunately the pages they are patching in no way ressemble the default installation templates, so now means there is going to be a lot of handcrafting to get it working.
However, the first priority now is to get a patch together to block anonymous editing, and create a fake error page for IPs which are blocked. Then I'll write a rollback patch.
UPDATE:
Edit Protect and Rollback features now implemented on the Birmingham OpenGuides site. The Edit Protect feature enables us to use a config file to block based on IP or username. The Rollback feature now allows us to cleanly remove wiki spammed pages. I'll look at creating a patch for both, together with a few other admin features, that can be rolled into both OpenGuides and CGI::Wiki distributions.
Re:hmmm
barbie on 2006-03-02T12:37:01
I think the templates we have are from an earlier version, which would explain why there are significant differences. I'll look at doing some merging next week when i have a little more time.
