XWiki installation cruisade
I am investigating the idea of writing a kind of portal about ecommerce news in french.
I decided to use XWiki [en] in order to have an easy to manage website, provide RSS feeds, and please Ludovic [fr] :-p
Anyway, here are the steps I did in order to get it working:
- add a subdomain in the DNS: http://ecommerce.kalixia.net [fr],
- unpack XWiki [en] war in Tomcat [en],
- alter Tomcat [en] configuration so that it handles appropriately the virtual host,
- alter Apache [en] configuration so that the virtual host delegates to Tomcat [en] through mod_jk,
- restart Tomcat [en] and Apache [en],
- try to connect to http://ecommerce.kalixia.net/bin/view/Main/WebHome.
The result was horrible: obviously there seem to be a problem with references to stylesheets and images. So I decided to open the HTML source and have a look at it. And I found it: XWiki [en] assumes that my application will be deployed on http://ecommerce.kalixia.net/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome instead of my current deployment for http://ecommerce.kalixia.net/bin/view/Main/WebHome (notice the xwiki/ in bold).
Now I’m fighting with XWiki [en] in order to find out how to solve this issue. First: look at the documentation: nada! Second: look at the expanded war (recursive grep on ‘bin’): nothing obvious! Third: search on google. I finally discovered most of the documentation on http://www.xwiki.com [en] and not http://www.xwiki.org [en] as I tried first because I downloaded XWiki [en] from that place. There is a link on http://www.xwiki.org [en] that refers to the real documentation but this link is not enough highlighted.
Anyway, looking at the ugly URLs used by http://www.xwiki.org [en], I do not think this will make a real difference to get rid of the xwiki/ webapp context. So I finally gave up and kept the webapp context in the URL.
Update: I am facing some Hibernate problems with http://www.xwiki.org [en]. This is really a nightmare because when you try to edit a wiki, the text given for edition is not the one displayed on the site… A quick Google search confirmed the fact that I’m not the only one having this issue with XWiki!
October 19th, 2005 at 5:28 pm
Hi,
The latest SVN version has improvements to reduce the URL size. There are some issues to be able to completely reduce the URLs..
I’ve found that because of the static content in the war, I cannot get rid of at least one ’string’ which identified the path that will be handled by the java code..
So the way to get minimal URLs is to have ‘/’ handle the webapp and allow ‘bin’ and ‘xwiki’ to be synonyms.
‘view’ becomes optionnal (only ‘edit’ and other actions are needed), but this means that no space can be called ‘view’ !
The space name becomes optionnal (configurable in xwiki.cfg).. The main page of a space becomes optionnal (default to WebHome).
In the end the shortest URL you can get is:
http://ecommerce.kalixia.net/xwiki/
http://ecommerce.kalixia.net/xwiki/Page
http://ecommerce.kalixia.net/xwiki/OtherSpace/
http://ecommerce.kalixia.net/xwiki/OtherSpace/OtherPage
Now some templates or static content for some reasons might expect ‘/xwiki/’ to find some static content.. I’m trying to get rid of this but it is not that easy.. There’s not always an easy solution to make this relative or dynamic..
If you want to help you are welcome.. My IM line is open..