General procedures
Before you update an existing wiki, MAKE A BACKUP! You have been warned, and it's not my fault when you end up like this...
Configuration update
After upgrading, your existing wiki should continue to work (the goal is to have sane defaults for any new config values, but then there can be bugs). Check that this is indeed the case, and then take the time to check the CHANGES file in your distribution. Often, new features will be invisible unless your extend your configuration in "moin.config.py".
This is especially true for:
- somewhat dangerous macros that won't be activated by default, because they're not advisable for public wikis. You need to explicitely activate those by adding an allowed_actions list to the config. Currently, the actions DeletePage and AttachFile are considered unsafe.
- email features: you need to provide mail_smarthost and mail_from.
- new pages icons: to get new icons like "XML", "Subscribe" etc. it's best to just delete the page_icons setting, now that "config.py" has a default for it. If you changed it in the past, add new icons from the "config.py" default to your "moin_config.py".
- when upgrading to version 0.11, it is advisable to add the sitename setting
Updating files
- Images
- On every update, you should copy the content of the "wiki-moinmoin/img" directory
to your "data/img" directory, normally a new release has some new GIFs in it.
- System pages
- When upgrading to a new version, copy at least the help pages ("Help*") to
your existing directory. Then check whether you miss any new system pages.
- InterWiki
- Check that you have the newest entries in the "intermap.txt" file; if you have "private" entries, add them to the distribution file, then copy the result over your current file. Note that starting with version 0.11, you can point "shared_intermap" at a file loaded before the file in your data directory, which takes precedence (i.e. have global entries in the shared one, private entries the data dir file).
Troubleshooting
To make UserPreferences work, you should "mkdir -m707 user" in your
"data" directory. A good idea is to run the new "test.cgi" script after
you installed a new release, which will spot some common errors.
Depending on your installation, more tightly secured permissions are a good idea.
Ideally, you assign all files in the data directory to the user the web server
runs under, and then you use 700 or 755.
